Pease expecting big rebound when liquidity rises

Group's under-fire European manager blames out-of-favour industrial cyclicals for recent underperformance, expecting better fortunes when M&A activity returns

New Star's Richard Pease has been one of the most successful European managers of recent years, with a strong spell at Jupiter before his current employer. His performance was reliably in the top quartiles until June last year, when sub-prime appears to have caught the manager off-guard. Returns across the whole of 2007 amounted to -6.64%, ranking the fund 87th out of 97 peers. Pease has 23 years' investment experience and runs both the £1.2bn European Growth onshore fund and its £600m Dublin mirror. He blames holdings in out-of-favour industrial cyclicals for recent underperformanc...