Behind the Balance Sheet

Lucy Macdonald is the former CIO of Global Equities at Allianz Global Investors where she worked for almost 20 years and managed £5bn or $8bn of assets. She is currently a NED on JP Morgan GEM Income Trust and taking care of a new puppy. Lucy has 30 years of experience in financial markets and is exactly the sort of guest we are hoping to have on the podcast – a wealth of experience, semi-retired, and not afraid to speak out. In this podcast she explains her really unusual route to finance, her approach to running successful portfolios, how to run a team of fund managers and analysts and how a woman copes in a man’s world. Full show notes here

Until 2015, Quintin Price was Global Head of BlackRock’s Alpha Strategies business where he was responsible for nearly $1 trillion of assets under management and was a member of the Global Executive Committee, working closely with Larry Fink. Quintin has 30 years of experience in financial markets and is exactly the sort of guest we seek to have on the podcast – a wealth of experience, retired from day to day fund management, and not afraid to speak out, as you will hear. Full show notes here.

Pete Davies has long been widely considered one of the greatest long term thinkers in the hedge fund world. He was early to recognise the opportunities to provide venture capital to UK academia and his firm, Lansdowne Partners, was instrumental in setting up Oxford Science Innovation. Spencer Crawley is the co-founder of FirstMinute Capital, a UK seed investor which boasts an astonishing 111 unicorn founders as investors. In this interview we discuss the UK venture scene, why early stage investing is truly a long term activity, and how this cycle compares to the late 1990s tech boom. Full show notes here.

In this fascinating interview, Stuart Roden, former Chairman of Lansdowne Partners, explains the 5 keys to a successful fund, how his 25 year partnership with Pete Davies produced one of the most successful hedge funds in the UK and how now managing venture capital is a different, yet similar, game. I have known Stuart for over 25 years but I learned more in this hour about his philosophy than I had previously. He has a winning combination of a razor sharp intellect, a love of markets, a wealth of experience and a nose for a winning idea. In this interview, we hear how he was tempted to fire a client, the 5 key factors to run a successful fund, why you are either an analyst or a portfolio manager, how handwriting can reveal whether you will be a good employee, and how he and Pete Davies ran an incredibly successful $10bn hedge fund. I know you will enjoy listening to this as much as I enjoyed recording it. Full show notes here

Two investors who went to the same school, then to Oxbridge, and have been awarded the CBE (*). They are both titans in their fields but through very different routes. One has run his hedge fund firm for 27 years, has been incredibly successful as evidenced by $28bn AUM, yet is so under the radar that few have heard of him. The other has started multiple companies, is a business celebrity and is recognised as one of the most successful people in UK tech. Full show notes here

Our new podcast is focused on equity investing. We shall meet leading investors and commentators and educate ourselves about the world of investing and the world. Our mission is to remove some of the mystique around investing and improve our understanding of what makes a successful investment, or indeed an unsuccessful one. We shall look in particular at the conjunction of venture and quoted stocks investing and interview practitioners, current and retired. Our goal is to inform, educate and entertain – we hope you every episode.