Ben Whitmore’s decision to leave Jupiter and set up his own value boutique will doubtless lead to many fund buyers dusting down their data as they ponder whether to stick with his successor, Alex Savvides, move with Whitmore to the boutique he is planning to launch, or do something else entirely.
The £10bn Whitmore managed at Jupiter accounts for just shy of the 20 per cent of firm’s £50bn assets under management at the end of December 2023.
That’s a concentration risk which may have given Jupiter chief executive Matthew Beesley his fair share of headaches, especially as Whitmore was vocal in terms of his communications internally around how the firm was run.
It’s an arrangement similar to that struck with Alex Darwall, the European equity manager who quit Jupiter in 2019 and took an investment trust with him, and as part of the terms of his exit had to agree not to launch a competing unit trust in his market.
Whitmore is forbidden from launching a UK equity income product for the next two years but negotiations are ongoing about whether he will take the Jupiter Global Value fund with him in some way.
Of that £10bn, £4.8bn was in segrated mandates but the largest fund run by Whitmore was the £2.1bn Special Situations fund, which is held by six of the allocators we cover which makes it one of the most popular UK growth funds in our database
Savvides currently runs JOHCM UK Dynamic, a £1.2bn strategy that is also held by six allocators.
The only two UK growth funds which outrank JOHCM UK Dynamic and Jupiter Special Situations are Lindsell Train UK Equity and Liontrust Special Situations, which are both held by seven of the allocators we cover.
As previously announced, the Jupiter Income Trust which Whitmore manages will soon come under the management of Adrian Gosden, who recently arrived from Gam.
Both Savvides and Whitmore manage their fair share of segregated mandates so it will be interesting to see who has the greater success in taking these funds with them, particularly as Whitmore has not been one for attending conferences or media events in recent years, something which also mirrored Darwall’s approach at Jupiter before he set of on his own.
More pertinently, the track record of fund managers setting up their own value boutiques is somewhat patchy - simply because of a lack of demand. Julie Dean and Chris Rice left Schroders to set up Sanditon in 2014 but in 2019 the company shut up shop with its funds transferring to Crux.
Meanwhile Rob Burnett, who left Neptune to start Lightman in 2019, has seen his flagship European equity fund surge in size and popularity.
Whitmore's thesis will doubtless be that the market has more appetite for what he's offering now, but time will tell.