Goodhart Partners has today stated that it is pleased by the recent announcement that the Global Opportunities Trust plc (LON:GOT) will be appointing Goodhart as discretionary investment manager, subject to regulatory approval.
Cahal Dowds, Chairman of GOT, said: “This is an evolution of Goodhart’s existing role supporting the Board of GOT and its Investment Director, Sandy Nairn. Sandy will now continue to perform his role as portfolio manager for GOT at Goodhart, working with Alan Bartlett and the wider Goodhart investment team.”
The key rationale for the change is to increase investment flexibility in how GOT is managed. Specifically, it facilitates greater flexibility in managing risk with the portfolio.
Sandy Nairn, Investment Director, comments: “We believe this is an ideal investing environment for GOT’s agile investment approach. We also believe that the key to generating attractive investment returns over the coming decade will be the flexibility to navigate increasingly aggressive market and interest rate cycles, combined with the ability to focus on specific investment opportunities.
“Since the investment policy for GOT was modified in 2021 to facilitate greater focus on absolute performance returns have been strong. The net asset value of GOT has generated returns similar to global equity markets but with substantially lower risk and essentially no correlation to broad global equity indices.”
Alan Bartlett, Partner at Goodhart, expands: “GOT’s investment approach takes responsibility for both risk and return. When investment ideas are abundant it tolerates market risk but when compelling absolute return ideas are scarce it focuses on protecting capital.”
Over the last two years Goodhart has increased resources to support GOT significantly. Responding to client demand, Goodhart recently launched an open-ended UCITS fund called the Goodhart Global Real Return Fund (“GRR”) which follows a very similar strategy to GOT.
Gary Tuffield, Partner at Goodhart, comments: “Clients are increasingly concerned that the index-relative investment strategies they invest in, and relatively static approaches to asset allocation they adopt, will lack the flexibility to navigate markets over the coming years. This is where GOT and GRR can perform a valuable role in portfolios.”
The Global Opportunities Trust plc (GOT) is a global equity strategy with variable market exposure, aiming to generate real returns over the long term.
Dr Sandy Nairn is a renowned global equity investor with over 40 years of experience. Sandy has managed GOT since inception, first in his role as founder, CIO/CEO of Edinburgh Partners and latterly as Investment Director since the Trust became self-managed.
Alan Bartlett was one of the founders of Goodhart Partners (“Goodhart”) in 2009 and has over 30 years investment experience. Sandy Nairn became an investor in Goodhart in 2013 through his holding company, Nairn Capital. Alan and Sandy worked together directly at Franklin Templeton, where Alan was Chief Investment Officer and Sandy Chairman of the Templeton Global Equity Group. It is here that the investment policy for GOT changed in 2021 to provide greater flexibility to target absolute returns. This coincided with Sandy publishing the book “The End of the Everything Bubble”.
Goodhart is a wholly independent investment partnership with two sides to its business. First its “partnerships” business supports an exclusive group of boutiques and investment strategies. Goodhart is a minority shareholder in Asset Value Investors, for example. The second part of the business is a global equity boutique that was founded in 2023 when Alan Bartlett and Sandy Nairn left Templeton.
Goodhart’s global equity boutique offers a range of investment strategies that all fit with the notion of “agile investing”. At its heart Goodhart believes that making money for clients over the next decade will require strategies that can blend flexibility with a willingness and ability to focus on specific investment opportunities rather than broad markets. It is a “rallying call” for active management in the belief that we have passed tipping points in many of the key drivers of globalization that underpinned strong returns for passive and private capital. It is now time for something different – agile investing.
