Celebrity fund manager Neil Woodford is not having a good week. One of his better-known holdings subprime lender Provident Financial is in a terrible state. So much so, as Alistair Osborne notes in The Times, that despite being invested in a business that lends money to the financially illiterate and desperate at APRs of well over 500% (a business model that rarely fails), the company's "shareholders are now almost as broke as the people [it] lends to".
Woodford is "hugely disappointed" by the news. He will be adding that to a growing pile of news in which he is at least a little disappointed. Earlier this week another of his holdings, plastic-pallet producer RM2, came clean on what The Sunday Times called a "series of blunders by an all-star board of directors". The firm raised £20m earlier this year and has burnt through £130m since listing three years ago, but is still unable to finance the volume of orders it expects over the next year. Perhaps, as the firm's chairman says, the decision to take the firm public in the first place was "problematic and premature" as was any decision to invest in it.
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