The Best Performing Small Cap Investor You've Never Heard Of - with Geoff Oldfield of Ennismore Fund Management

In this episode, I am joined by someone who is probably the best-performing smaller companies fund manager you have never heard of. 

I first met Geoff Oldfield in the 1990s when he was working as the co-manager of the European Select Fund at Barings Asset Management. He and his partner Gerhard Shoeningh were making a name for themselves in the sector and, in 1998, left to set up Ennismore Fund Management with some very firm ideas about the type of investment firm they wanted to run.

The main pillars were performance over asset gathering (no fund marketing), investment decisions taken by PMs, not a committee, clawback of performance fees to reward individual contributions, and a firm owned internally by its portfolio managers. 

Ennismore’s first fund was launched in January 1999. It has been closed to new investors for most of its life, and a significant proportion of the fund is owned by its portfolio managers, including Geoff.  

I was fortunate enough to invest in the Ennismore European Smaller Companies fund on its launch. Over the subsequent nearly 25 years, it has delivered a 17-fold return with a focused absolute return strategy in European-listed smaller companies. This is an average annual return of 12%. Remarkably over the period, the fund only had three down years: 2008, 2009, and 2020, which together represented an aggregate negative 12% return. This is a track record fully demonstrating the advantages of an absolute return approach.  

Geoff is not a public figure and I have spoken to him about doing this podcast since he returned to frontline fund management. After a 10-year break, Geoff came back into portfolio management in an effort to help turn around the Ennismore Global Fund. This 2016 fund had scored “an own goal” (as Geoff puts it) while running short positions in the meme stock-obsessed NASDAQ market of 2020.  

Geoff is the epitome of the humble investor being respectful of Mr Market and also knowing when to take advantage of his emotionally charged moments of mis-valuation. He talks about mistakes he made in the GFC and how providing liquidity to investors is a good discipline despite investing in an illiquid asset class. He also describes how he defines quality companies and how they should be valued, but he also talks about how he always looks for a margin of safety. Critically he discusses what makes smaller companies such a rich seam of opportunity for value investors a strategy he has successfully pursued in the changing market circumstances for more than a quarter of a century.

I must remind you that nothing you hear today is investment advice. The views expressed are personal to the contributors and do not represent the views of Progressive Equity or Ennismore Fund Management. I hope you find it enjoyable and educational. As always when I chat with Geoff, I learned a lot.  

Please enjoy my conversation with the maverick investor, Geoff Oldfield. 

Brought to you by Progressive Equity.