Some of our conversations are deliberately different, and the man I interview here has cost me a lot of money! I also consider him a friend and somebody whose perspective I have valued.
It could be said that Neil Woodford, CBE, has had a career of two halves, the first of which encompassed extraordinary investment success at Invesco Perpetual and then at Woodford Investment Management (2014-2019).
At its peak, Woodford’s business managed £15bn and was backed by Hargreaves Lansdowne and St. James’s Place. Its clients included Kent County Council’s pension fund, a range of wealth management firms and 300,000+ retail investors.
Yet in 2019 the fund was suspended and then liquidated, following a shift in asset allocation from blue-chip public equities to illiquid, unlisted companies (he denies this was the cause of the collapse in this discussion). In the run up to the collapse, he experienced approximately £7bn of outflows.
Using an investment lens, here we try to examine and understand what went right, what went wrong and now what may lie ahead.
Neil remains under investigation by the UK Financial Conduct Authority at the time of this interview (March 2025).
