Coming off the back of their worst-ever year, Stuart Roden and Peter Davies – co-managers of the big Lansdowne UK fund, which is soon to be renamed as the Lansdowne Developed Markets Fund – remain sanguine about prospects for their core holdings and their investment strategy in spite of the difficult market conditions and the fund’s poor performance in 2011.
Beginning a detailed and insightful December newsletter with an apology to their investors for the fund’s 20% loss last year – which marked its only significant down year in more than 10 years of otherwise spectacular performance – the pair admitted that the dominance of political and macro events in 2011 had taken them by surprise.
“Whereas our ability to exclude noise in assessing...