We were not natural home workers, though the technology surprisingly worked. The panic sell in mid-March was novel in that the small-cap market did briefly fail in a way it did not in 2008, but a couple of months later equity bases were being rebuilt with 10% placings spreading like their own pandemic. We really enjoyed the next 27 days or so until someone flew back from a ski holiday in Italy feeling more peeky than one might have expected after a week of chianti, pasta, meat, cheese and solar radiation. The outlook did seem to improve markedly after the final deal was done and a new government with a big majority was elected at the end of 2019. One of the little reported common themes was that PLCs worked it out quickly and didn’t moan about it much at all – but that didn’t stop the UK being seen as a go-from asset class. The interminable Brexit negotiations dominated much of the sentiment towards UK equities in the late teens.
The former is now online-only, and the shirts have long since stopped being made in Southend, while the latter morphed into Insight and their splendid townhouse office was converted into a private home – whose owner is probably no longer allowed to enter the country. Lewin’s shirt shop on the ground floor of Eagle House and Clerical Medical on St James’s Square in the late 1990s. The return to the West End for me was nostalgic, having worked at T.M. Oh, the unimaginable joys of being able to actually do what you want when you want in a small-cap portfolio.
#Highfive funding full#
On our very first day, we found out that our operating system could not cope with the fact that we didn’t complete every ticket in full every day. Euphemisms such as unhelpful background and geo-political headwinds abound but the reality of small-cap investing is that it is really not that easy even when the going is good, that’s why we exist.
In our 60 months to date, we think that UK small cap, our founding DNA for want of anything more sophisticated, has been in favour for about 8 months from November 2020 to May 2021. No longer could I disappear into the bowels of a big and successful fund management house and find myself a useful role into retirement if / when I was finally found out as incompetent in the day job – an inevitability at some stage. The gestation period had all been legals, PR and generally trying to keep the plan on track, but when we left, it felt real and quite scary for the first time. Walking out through the ‘big office’ turnstiles I recall thinking that a cloak of corporate protection had been removed from me, possibly forever. In a nod to the geography of our move and the fact we were only continuing to manage long/short money, John hired an S-class Uber (remember them?) for the exit from Gresham St. Tellworth turned 5 last month, so I thought it might be a good time to reflect on our journey from maternity ward to reception class.
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