She eventually settled on Downing, a company she had known for years but had always thought of as “a rather boring venture capital trust house”, albeit one run by “fundamentally good people”.įounding partner and chair Nick Lewis and CEO Tony McGing agreed to let her set up her own fund management business in exchange for help rationalising several poorly performing Aim VCTs they had taken back in-house. Therefore, I had to find a small house to do it.” “The one issue with microcap is that it is constrained in terms of the assets under management (AUM) that you can bring in just because of the size of the companies you’re investing in. “What I realised was that sometimes the private companies are far more grown up and better structured in terms of their governance than the ones on the market.”īut she had ambitions to launch a micro-cap mandate of her own. “That was a real privilege because I got to see companies that were literally coming out of universities and, at the same time, I got to work with companies that were coming onto the market,” MacKenzie recalls. After the bubble burst in 2001, she launched her fund management career at Aberdeen Asset Management investing in Aim and private companies for its venture capital trust (VCT) range. She cut her teeth at Allied Provincial Securities, helping companies float on the Unlisted Securities Market, the precursor to the Alternative Investment Market (Aim) exchange.įrom there, she became a technology analyst during the dotcom bubble, which she jokingly refers to as the “TNT boom, boom years” where every stock she recommended went up. MacKenzie knew early on she wanted to specialise in smaller companies. Therefore, we’re master of our own destiny far more in this type of situation than we are in momentum-driven markets where something with long dated cashflows is on a crazy valuation.” ![]() “We are really engaged with the businesses we invest into. “What we find is our performance is so non-index correlated which, in these types of markets, gets people quite interested,” says MacKenzie. The FTSE All-Share and FTSE Aim All-Share have fallen 11% and 22%, respectively, by comparison. ![]() Her £45m Downing Strategic Micro-Cap Investment Trust has done a decent job weathering the storm, with shares down just 6% year to date. ![]() In fact, the self-professed micro-cap value investor welcomes a break from the monotonous growth-driven bull market of the past decade. Downing Fund Managers boss Judith MacKenzie (pictured) is not a fan of volatile markets but is not scared of them either.
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