Investment Director Leaves UK's Newton For Rival

Rachel Walsh

13 March 2009

Alex Stanic, director of investment management and head of the Special Opportunities Fund at Newton, is to leave the London-listed firm to join rival investment managers River & Mercantile as a partner and head of global equities. He takes up his new role after fulfilling contractual obligations to Newton.

Under Mr Stanic, the global equities division will develop a range of strategies consistent with the River and Mercantile global equity investment philosophy and process that will be developed by the new team.

Mr Stanic is a global equities fund manager responsible for leading a team running £10.5 billion ($14.49 billion) of client assets, of which he is personally responsible for £4.5 billion.

He manages pooled strategies that include Newton Global Opportunities, BNYMellon Global Intrepid, BNYMellon Global Equity and he founded Global Equity Unconstrained and Global Equity World ex-UK strategies.

Newton told WealthBriefing that Mr Stanic’s team will continue to manage the global and international funds he worked on. All Newton funds have two managers. In the case of Mr Stanic’s funds, Paul Markham has co-managed to this point. The firm will announce details of who will lead on Mr Stanic’s funds in the near future.

R&M is a specialist fund management business set up by James Barham and Julian Cripps, both formerly of LionTrust, in 2006 with backing from Sir John Beckwith and Mark Johnson of Knightsbridge-based Pacific Investments. The firm’s UK equities division launched its Potential Valuation Time investment philosophy, designed to unearth investment anomalies, into the market later that year.

Since then, it has launched six dedicated strategies (UK Equity, UK High Alpha, UK Unconstrained, UK Smaller Companies, UK Long Term Recovery and most recently UK Equity Income).

R&M raised assets in excess of £1 billion in its first 24 months of trading. These assets were raised from a range of institutional and retail clients, investing in both pooled and segregated accounts, and the UK equities division has received support from investment consultants and other professional advisors.