Neil Woodford’s back – but has he really learned anything?

Disgraced fund manager Neil Woodford is planning a comeback. But he doesn’t seem to have learned much from his many mistakes. So why would anyone invest with him now?

Angry mob
Have Woodfords' investors forgiven him yet?
(Image credit: © Getty Images)

All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure – so said Enoch Powell. Is it the same for fund managers? Hedge fund manager Paul Marshall of Marshall Wace thinks so – and says so in his new book, 10.5 Lessons from Experience – but I’m not sure he’s right. If it’s a failure to more or less benchmark an index for 30 years and retire to the Home Counties with a lucrative defined-benefit pension long before you are 60, then, perhaps they have all failed.

But most of us would be more likely to consider the nice pension and the pre-senility retirement to be a pretty good result. I suspect Marshall means not that all ordinary fund management lives end badly, but that all brilliant fund management ones do. It makes sense. As he says, if a manager does well, investors rush to their fund “making it increasingly challenging to deliver the same return per unit of risk”. When returns begin to fall as a result, “investors can vote with their feet, pushing the fund managers into forced liquidation and unleashing a negative spiral of poor performance and subsequent liquidation”.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.