InvestmentsMar 16 2018

Woodford in-depth: Can he bounce back again?

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Woodford in-depth: Can he bounce back again?

The numbers don’t make for pleasant reading: Neil Woodford’s flagship Equity Income fund is down 11.7 per cent over the past 12 months, and 8.6 per cent this year alone, according to FE. He’s bottom of his sector over three years, some 14 percentage points behind the average fund.

The current slump has, at least, got the contrarian investor antennae twitching.

 “He’s always either the star manager who can do no wrong or he’s out of favour and everyone’s questioning him,” says Andrew Gilbert, an investment manager at Parmenion.

 “We are monitoring the Income fund very closely”, says Ben Conway, a senior fund manager at Hawksmoor Investment Management, which does not own the portfolio.

The issue is that other buyers have held the fund all the way down. Some have decided to crystallise those losses – Woodford Equity Income is shedding around £200m a month due to its performance struggles – but plenty remain committed. 

The question for those holders, as for Mr Conway, is whether there is light at the end of the tunnel. There is also an additional problem this time: issues with unquoted investments.

Quote unquote

Selling listed stocks to meet redemptions, at a time when unquoted holdings already account for more than 9 per cent of the portfolio, means a battle to stay under the 10 per cent regulatory limit on these illiquid stocks.

Mr Woodford says he is comfortable with the position, and adds a portion of these holdings will go public in the coming months. Immunotherapy firm Autolus, a small position, is one firm that has already announced plans to list in the near future. The manager is also finding ways to cut good deals ahead of that point: witness the sale of his AJ Bell stake to Invesco, for a valuation at which the platform intends to IPO later this year, as well as M&G’s planned takeover of rural broadband provider Gigaclear.

There’s no question these sales come at a handy time for the Oxford-based investor. Other strategies have also been used in the past: a sizeable holding in Benevolent AI was moved from the Income fund to his Patient Capital investment trust last November, a deal which gave the unquoted tech firm a far larger presence in the trust (it now accounts for 7 per cent of Patient Capital).

But the trust, too, is now bumping against its own 80 per cent unquoted stock limit, and holders are unlikely to welcome further deals in any case.

“What you ideally want to see is purchase and sale decisions happen for the purest reason, not to help accommodate the open-ended fund. But [Benevolent AI was] already held across the business, so there is conviction there,” says Mr Conway, whose firm does have an investment in Patient Capital.

Other holdings

Juggling these considerations will have been a challenge for Chris Martin, who took over as chief compliance officer at Woodford Investment Management last July, according to his LinkedIn profile, following the departure of head of compliance Simon Osborne.

The previous month, June 2017, marked the start of Mr Woodford’s recent woes, courtesy of the first in a series of profit warnings from doorstep lender Provident Financial.

But it isn’t the high-profile blow-ups that have done the most damage to Woodford’s fund in the near term. His largest holding, Imperial Brands, has declined more gradually - yet its weighting, at over 6 per cent of the portfolio, means its 18 per cent decline has cost 1.6 percentage points’ worth of performance since the start of the year, according to Morningstar.

On a 12-month view, its 2.7 percentage point impact is rivalled only by Provident and by Prothena, the US healthcare stock that came under attack from short sellers at the end of 2017.

Imperial Brands’ decline is partly down to investors viewing a long-mooted takeover by rival Japan Tobacco as, well, an increasingly long shot. Plausible noises to the contrary would be a boon to the fund.

What could be the other catalysts for a return to form? Most simple is signs of life at underlying businesses. Burford Capital, which provides funding for litigation cases, jumped 30 per cent on 14 March as results impressed. A top-ten holding in the Income fund, Burford has now added 1.5 per cent to performance over the past year – well in advance of any other holding.

Fund positioning

Mr Woodford’s principle argument is that his performance will improve when the market stops focusing on “momentum” and starts to look at valuations more closely. This isn’t as simple as saying he’s a defensive manager in a growth market, but some metrics do define him as such. Woodford Equity Income looks cautious even by the standards of the equity income sector, according to Morningstar data.

As of 31 January, 35 per cent of the fund is in defensives, 46 per cent in cyclicals, and 18 per cent in halfway-house ‘sensitive’ sectors. That compares with respective sector averages of 21, 40 and 28 per cent.

A closer look colours that impression. The largest single sector overweight is to healthcare, helped by a healthy position in pharmaceuticals.

But much of the rest is biotech and life sciences. Those companies may well outperform if their businesses start showing signs of success. But momentum trades going into reverse could mean investors look for safe havens, not just attractive valuations, and these holdings are unlikely to qualify by that metric. 

The last word should go to the manager, who contests this notion. A spokesman says Mr Woodford, unsurprisingly, remains confident in his thesis: “While there are risks, there are equally opportunities – that is always the case when markets get carried away. He believes the best opportunities lie in UK domestically-focused stocks, a healthcare sector that has endured a prolonged bear market and companies (of all sizes) that have disruptive technologies at their core.”