Nicola Horlick captures the radio station

The UK's best-known fund manager Nicola Horlick is in the news today as her investment vehicle is involved in losses due to the Madoff scandal in the States which has swallowed $50bn in a massive financial fraud.  I interviewed her last month for simply-communicate and two things struck me about the way she operates.  The first is that her business is based on extremely detailed analysis: she foresaw the credit crunch and got out of equities a year ago.  And secondly - she knows how to communicate.
So what do we make of the Madoff scandal? On the face of it this was a very unwise investment - and that's how the newspapers and the BBC portrayed it over the weekend. 
So what does Horlick do?  She gets herself the best speaking platform available - the BBC's Today Programme and goes on-air at prime time to set the record straight.  The BBC wanted to hear about how she could have made such a mistake.  But the message she sent out to her investors was that the fund in question has only lost 4% of its value since the exposure to Madoff was only 9% and they have been making some money on the dollar in the meantime.
Incredibly the programme's anchor Evan Davis topped off the interview by agreeing that a 4% loss was pretty good in these times.  That's the kind of endorsement that money can't buy and Horlick must be pretty pleased with the outcome.
All in all it was a case study in how to deal with a crisis.  Grab the radio station, make sure you communicate the message you want to get out and win yourself some credible endorsement on the way.  Now all she needs is Robert Peston to put in a good word to make her Christmas

Comments

[Steve Hemingway]

According to the FT (http://markets.ft.com/tearsheets/performance.asp?s=BRAL:LSE&vsc_appId=ts&ftsite=FTCOM&searchtype=equity&searchOption=equity), Bramdean Alternatives (BRAL:LSE) has lost 52% of its value over the last year, compared to 32% for the FTSE100. The price recently hit 40p vs an issue price in 2007 of 100. This is roughly on a par with the performance of all the other funds she has been associated with since leaving MAM. It takes five minutes to look up the actual performance of Ms Horlick as a fund manager but instead the press seem fixated by the fact that she is able to hold down a job and not need nannies for her kids at weekends.

My view is that she's missed her vocation. She is infinitely better at getting good publicity (and obtaining investors) than actually managing those investments.