ONSIDE / ROUND TABLE
A menu of opportunities
We invited a selection of guests to meet with the team over lunch to discuss
opportunities across the growing range of the Seneca Group
MT: One of your unique
characteristics, Alan, seems to be that
investors can drop in and meet your
team, the people making the decisions.
That’s unusual, even in London, isn’t it?
AB: We have an open door policy.
We’ve always welcomed clients and
investors to come into the office and
have a chat with the team about what
we’re doing. I think it differentiates
us from a lot of other fund managers,
we offer complete access to all the
different managers and we’re very
happy to do that.
MT: How do you get round issues
of scale with the people you’re
competing with?
Moving into fund management
Michael Taylor: Now Seneca has a
new investment arm working with the
investor base what are your hopes and
ambitions for the business?
Alan Burrows: We started as Midas
Capital over 12 years ago; we came
out of the Merseyside Pension Fund
team. We offer a multi-asset approach
to investing, balanced investment
management. We invest mainly in
quoted markets across a whole range
of assets encompassing property,
commodities, equities, bonds and
we’ve got two open-ended funds which
are at about £130-£150 million each.
The business was bought as part of
a reverse takeover back in 2008;
it became a quoted company, we then
went through a tough period. New
management was brought in back in
2011; that management has been very
much looking to grow a London-based
business and haven’t felt comfortable
running a multi-asset business in
Liverpool. We’re now looking forward
to going back to our roots with
northern ownership.
AB: We’re very much top down
investors. We don’t spend a lot of time
meeting companies or just doing that
bottom up approach, in the way a
smaller companies manager would
do, or equity managers more generally.
We’re trying to take a view of the world
where we allocate capital to where it
could be most effectively deployed at
any particular time and across a whole
wide range of assets. We get an awful
lot of help and support from
economists.
MT: How have the events of 2008
affected your investment strategy
now? Obviously, that’s been reflected
in a more stable performance since
then?
Guests:
Michael Taylor (chair) / Ian Currie, Seneca / Rick Parry, Investor, Bramley Corporation / Chris Hopkinson, Investor, Director,
Entrepreneur / Richard Matthewman, Investor, Director, Entrepreneur / Andrew Currie, Seneca / Alex Dymock, Seneca /
Melanie Hird, Seneca / Norman Molyneux, Acceleris / Alan Burrows, Seneca Investments