By Tom Aylott, Reporter, Trustnet, 10 July 2023:
Investors in the Mid Wynd International Investment Trust should take a wait-and-see approach to the new managers selected by the board, according to experts.
It announced in June that Lazard would be taking over from Artemis as manager of the £428m portfolio – a move that may leave some shareholders wondering how the new firm and managers will integrate with the Mid Wynd strategy.
The board decided to switch up the team in preparation for current manager Simon Edelsten’s retirement later this year. He has run the trust since 2014, during which time it beat the IT Global sector by 80.1 percentage points with a total return of 184.8%.
Edelsten’s experience was an attractive quality to the trust, so Artemis were quick to place Alex Stanic as co-manager ready to take over his portfolios at the end of the year.
He moved over from J.P. Morgan, where he had previously managed the JPM Global Unconstrained Equity fund, which beat the IA Global sector with a total return of 55.4% during his five-year tenure.
Despite this, the board decided to make a change announcing Lazard duo Barnaby Wilson and Louis Florentin-Lee as the new managers.
Under their stewardship, the Lazard Managed Equity fund is up 27.5% since 2019, trailing 8.6 percentage points behind its peers in the IA Global sectors…
Although the fund has been active since 2022, its quality-growth strategy has been used by the firm since 2011 and included some overlap with some of the names in Mid Wynd…
Although investors should remain alert around the trust’s transition over to the new firm and managers, Salih said it is worth waiting to see how things play out…
This was echoed by James Carthew, head of investment company research at QuotedData, who said the move “might work but we’ll have to wait and see”.
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