Losses have almost halved at Blue Whale Capital, the fund house chaired by Hargreaves Lansdown founder Peter Hargreaves.
Mr Hargreaves is one of two partners in the firm, along with fund manager Stephen Yiu, who runs the company’s only fund, the £218m Blue Whale Growth fund.
Accounts filed at Companies House this week showed the company lost £280,000 in the year to the end of March 2019, compared with a loss of £488,000 for the previous year.
The company’s turnover rose from £151,000 to £571,000 during the year.
Blue Whale Capital was created by Mr Yiu, a former Hargreaves Lansdown employee who also worked as a fund manager at Artemis.
Mr Hargreaves has previously told FTAdviser that he wanted Mr Yiu to manage some family money for him as he respected the fund manager’s work ethic, and Blue Whale evolved from that.
He seeded the fund with £25m of his own capital, and later said this stake had risen in value to £40m within the first year.
But he recently expressed frustration at how relatively little money the fund has raised since its launch in September 2017, as he feels the performance had justified it.
Blue Whale Capital has returned 19 per cent over the past year, beating the IA Global sector average of 13.27 per cent and ranking 38th of the 320 funds in the group.
But the performance has lagged more recently, underperforming the sector over the past six months by returning 0.38 per cent compared with 3.3 per cent.
Over the past three months, the fund has lost 2.28 per cent, ranking it 250 out of 329 funds over this time period.
More recently Mr Hargreaves wrote in a letter to clients: “Someone recently pointed out that Blue Whale currently sits outside the top 10 investments in the IA Global space in 2019.
"This does not bother me in the slightest – especially when you consider what occupies the top spots.
"Over any given period there will be ‘darling’ subsectors of the global investment universe – things like healthcare and energy focussed investments.
"But those investments that are chart topping this month, could just as easily be at the bottom next month as sector-specific sentiment changes (possibly due to errant ‘tweeting’ by a certain Mr Trump!).”
david.thorpe@ft.com
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