Odyssean Investment Trust: making the best of difficult circumstances.

Odyssean Investment Trust, set up to profit from supporting “misunderstood companies”, is a mere three years old – but its record to date and managers’ expertise make it a buy.

Fund managers are generally not good at running businesses. If they were, they would be in the wrong job. The objectivity and broad perspective of a fund manager is potentially of great value to a company, but requires the discipline of the private-equity specialist to justify the effort. Here, fund managers do add value through “active” involvement in the management of businesses they control, in contrast to the “passive” approach of most professional investors.

Setting up shop

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Max King
Investment Writer

Max has an Economics degree from the University of Cambridge and is a chartered accountant. He worked at Investec Asset Management for 12 years, managing multi-asset funds investing in internally and externally managed funds, including investment trusts. This included a fund of investment trusts which grew to £120m+. Max has managed ten investment trusts (winning many awards) and sat on the boards of three trusts – two directorships are still active.

After 39 years in financial services, including 30 as a professional fund manager, Max took semi-retirement in 2017. Max has been a MoneyWeek columnist since 2016 writing about investment funds and more generally on markets online, plus occasional opinion pieces. He also writes for the Investment Trust Handbook each year and has contributed to The Daily Telegraph and other publications. See here for details of current investments held by Max.