Patrick Evershed Leaves New Star
Manager of struggling fund departs New Star.
Many New Star funds have struggled in the credit crunch, badly denting the firm's earnings, but Evershed's woes at Select Opportunities are of longer standing. Although the fund is in the UK All Companies IMA sector, it has been dominated by heavy stakes in small- and micro-cap stocks, and we at Morningstar have thus placed it in our UK Small-Cap Equity peer group. Relative to that group, the fund has placed in the bottom decile in each of the past three calendar years, and has only once escaped the category's bottom quartile once since its 2002 launch. Its five-year annualised loss of 1.59% lags the category average by more than 9 percentage points per year on an annualised basis. Evershed has more than 40 years of investment experience, and had come to New Star from Rathbones, where he managed Rathbones Special Situations, in late 2002.
Green took over the equity portion of New Star Managed Distribution from Toby Thompson on 16 June. His performance at RCM was mixed. He outperformed his peers in the Morningstar UK Mid-Cap category by 3.5 percentage points per annum for the six years he was running the UK Mid-Cap fund, but trailed his peers in the Morningstar UK Large-Cap Blend and UK Large-Cap Growth categories at UK High Alpha and UK Growth, respectively.