Ann: Funds Under Management and Performance Fees - December 2020, page-26

I like the business and their historical approach but at the end of the day Hamish read the markets wrong. The conservative approach to the covid recovery market isn't reflected by any other serious fund managers, its the equivalent of betting against Tesla. Even if you see a risk there betting against it is madness. Market psychology matters, the market is pricing out a few years of Covid struck economies whether or not Hamish wants to focus on the present moment and ignore the future.

At this point he f*ed up and to say he is "well positioned" is basically a joke, he was on the wrong side of the currency equation which is difficult to predict but the pull out of the markets is inexcusable, emotion driven investing imo. When you have the federal reserve having members make statements such as that they have "infinite" capital to inject into financial markets to provide liquidity and support even the stock market, it just doesn't make sense to ignore it.

The reality is that the worst is probably over for them in regards to currency and that headwind could just as easily become a tailwind, but on stock picking and portfolio structuring they had a poor 2020. If they wanted to be defensive a smarter strategy would have been a currency hedge than moving to USD at a time of massive quantitive easing and 0%ish interest rates.