Polar Capital

After being founded in 2001 by the former Henderson managers Tim Woolley and Brian Ashford-Russell, who ran the highly successful technology fund, this boutique has been built by launching new strategies and hiring management teams. Within Polar, each team continues to enjoy a high degree of autonomy while benefiting from centralized distribution, compliance, risk management, and legal services, and the profit-sharing arrangement that links to both management and performance fees allows an entrepreneurial manager to allocate resources effectively. With a number of highly rated strategies under Polar's umbrella and discipline on capacity over the past few years, we continue to hold an Above Average rating. The firm's strategy remains focused on" growth with diversity," concentrating on adding complementary strategies and managers. The firm has executed on that relatively well, so that the technology strategy made up 38% of total assets as of March 2023, down from 49% as of March 2021. Although the failed acquisition of Phaeacian Partners was not a great step forward, this was due to quite idiosyncratic reasons, and other recent acquisitions such as the Robeco clean energy team have bedded down quite well, although it would be good to have seen some more new strategies and teams joining in the interim. Although assets have fallen since the last review, this is somewhat to be expected given the large weighting to the technology strategy through a growth-led selloff, and we have seen outflows slow over the past couple of quarters.