Anyone in the investment fund or financial world will know Neil Woodford. He worked for Invesco Perpetual where he became famous as a highly successful fund manager before beginning his own fund, Woodford Investment Management, a few years ago. He was a Brexiteer and in May this year (HERE) said Brexit was a "sideshow" and that our economy was set fair.
In an interview in May with Telegraph Money he explained why his optimism about the British economy had led him to tilt his portfolio towards businesses that are tied to it, such as banks, house builders and property firms, “Ninety per cent of economists said we would have an instant recession if Britain voted to leave the EU. They were talking nonsense,” he said. “Other, more profound factors determine our economic future. I’m not underestimating the impact of Brexit but..."
So, it actually turned out that it was our great Brexiteer fund manager who was talking nonsense. After "tilting" his portfolio towards the British economy is now saying he is sorry (HERE) to investors after losing hundreds of millions of pounds on the back of a series of disastrous stock-picks. I think it ably demonstrates he had no idea what he was doing and knows as little about the British economy as most other fund managers.
Following a summer of woes, Neil Woodford admitted to investors that he was "right to be criticised" in a rarely seen public apology from a fund manager. "It's been a difficult period. And I'm very sorry for the poor performance that we've delivered really now since 2016," he said last week.
If Mr Woodford looks back the economists who forecast an "instant recession," they did so in the belief the government would invoke Article 50 on June 24th 2016. Given what we now know of the massive problems, had Cameron done as he had promised, we would almost certainly had an instant recession. Where these economists were wrong was to use the word "instant". Maybe. But we are not out of the woods yet.
