Has Anthony Bolton got it wrong again?

The once-legendary fund manager Anthony Bolton is set to retire in 2014. But once again, he could be getting his timing all wrong, says Merryn Somerset Webb.

Regular readers will know that I have spent much of the last few years feeling extremely irritated with Anthony Bolton. For a long time he was one of the few fund managers in the UK it appeared ordinary investors could trust to make them decent (if expensive) long term returns via his Fidelity Special Situations Fund. Then, having retired triumphant, he returned to the fray a few years back, apparently with a plan to lose the faithful everything he had previously made for them.

The Fidelity China Special Situations Investment Trust was launched in the wrong market at the wrong time and very much at the wrong price. At a time when most investment trusts were already beginning to murmur among themselves about cutting fees, Bolton's new trust came in with a 1.5% management fee and a performance fee. Even worse, Fidelity used some of that high fee base to pay commission to IFAs to shovel people into the fund.

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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.