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Former fund manager Neil Woodford is planning to launch a service offering his stockpicking strategies to investors for a fee, just six years after his eponymous fund group collapsed.
Woodford wrote in his financial blog on Monday that he was aiming to roll out “W4.0” for investors who are “thoughtful, independent and long-term” and who wish to invest “without the cost or complexity of a traditional fund”.
The former fund manager wrote that “the rise of online platforms and copy trading shows that many people want to take an active role in building their portfolios.
“But while some of that has veered towards speculation and volatility — what I’d call gambling, not investing — there’s also a growing demand for something more thoughtful. A way to construct portfolios for long-term goals, not short-term thrills.”
Woodford said the new service would provide “access to active investment strategies I’ve built, with the freedom to act on them through your own broker or platform. You can follow them as they are, or adapt them to suit your needs. You stay in control — but you’re not on your own.”
His plan to unveil a new investment service comes after the collapse of his former boutique Woodford Investment Management in 2019. The company was forced to close after investors rushed to withdraw their money from Woodford’s mutual funds, which had large holdings in hard-to-trade shares, triggering one of the UK’s biggest investment scandals.
The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority said last year that Woodford had a “defective” understanding of his responsibilities in the run-up to the collapse of his £3.7bn Equity Income Fund, following a lengthy probe by the financial regulator.
The FCA added that Woodford’s “unreasonably narrow understanding of his responsibilities for managing liquidity risks” ultimately led to the fund’s collapse, which trapped roughly 300,000 investors and left them nursing losses. Woodford said at the time that he disagreed with the FCA’s findings.
Woodford unveiled his financial blog shortly after the FCA’s probe and said that he was not “a villain”, blaming the collapse of his investment firm partly on economic and political issues following Brexit. He added that the downfall of his firm would “always weigh heavily” on him.
Woodford said in his blog on Monday that he could “share more strategies, more ideas and more updates than would ever be possible in a traditional fund structure” through W4.0, as it was “not bound by the constraints of fund launches or minimum sizes”.
He added that W4.0 would be “a community platform” through which Woodford would share “insight through video, writing, live sessions and active discussion groups”.
Woodford made his name at Invesco as one of the UK’s best-known retail fund managers before he set up his eponymous firm.
