One error at the end there peejay. JB has been the CIO from when...

One error at the end there peejay. JB has been the CIO from when Wilson Leaders (now ALF) listed back in early 2004. I have the original prospectus. While Wilson was the 'carrot', I seem to recall him readily admitting that JB (ex BT analyst) was running the show. Ironically, JB's last couple of years at BT were on international equities.

I reckon the problem arose when he got his market neutral ideas. I did a bit of a study (there's a post here somewhere) and concluded that from then on his stock picking had not adding value. Wasn't losing value either, but that looks bad when the index keeps going up or even compared to the risk free rate of return at the time. I'm usually the buy and hold type, but through no skill of my own needed some cash and unloaded a swag of options when the shares were trading at a large premium to NTA, so I can breath a bit easier than most.

In general, making money from shorts is notoriously difficult. You have to pay to borrow the stock to short, you can't hang on forever and so have to get the direction AND the timing right, and markets historically tend to go up! Other than BT's big short call in '87, I have difficulty recalling a really successful shorting strategy. While JB was not at BT back then, I always wondered if he had been influenced by that event.