Wearmouth's Swip restructuring averts performance downturn

Swip European manager moves away from illiquid companies and heavy Greece overweight, which she believes would have damaged returns in current conditions

Catie Wearmouth may have averted a performance disaster on Swip's Europe ex-UK funds, radically restructuring the portfolios after taking over from Vincent Devlin and Alister Hibbert. She said the funds were slanted towards risky companies when she took over last October at the early stages of the credit crunch. "There was a bias towards small, illiquid companies," she said. "The portfolios were also very concentrated in terms of the bets on these - so I was very uncomfortable in what I felt was a deteriorating macro environment." The managers could have been in the process of takin...