FUND MANAGER PROFILE DAVID JANE
Keeping it simple
is key to success
M&G’s David Jane runs a multi-national equities
team that has country-specific, regional and global
mandates, as well as managing multi-asset,
multi-geography portfolios himself. Yet he still
makes it all sound simple and straightforward… htforward…
BY GARY CORCORAN
“When I am hiring fund
managers I am looking for
certain personality and
character traits, much more
than I’m looking at qualifications
or technical knowledge,
as it is those qualities
that will sort the good
managers from the bad.”
M&G’s David Jane has a
solid, grounded and
‘grown-up’ outlook on life
in the City rather than
the tick-box mentality of
far too many who quickly
become institutionalised
working in the Square Mile.
It probably helps that
his path into the City started
with him not doing
particularly well in his
A-levels, he confesses, and
it was the clearing system
that took him to Keele
University in the mid-1980s
and an economics and statistics
degree – “the combination
of the real world
and sums” – rather than
the more traditional Ivy
League university route following
glowing exam
results.
The draw of the City,
however, was paternal
rather than financial, as his
father worked there, as did
his grandfather. Yet Jane
still manages to appear as
someone who has spent a
great deal of time on the
outside looking in at the
fund management world,
rather than being ingrained
in doing things in a particular,
staid way. He brings a
more human approach to
managing money.
“There is no correlation
between academic outcomes
and how good a
fund manager they are;
there is a lot of correlation
between their personality
traits, their ambition and
determination.”
l Freedom to act
Jane is in a fairly unique
position in that he is head
of the equities team at
M&G as well as manager
of the multi-asset Cautious
Multi-Asset and Managed
funds. With shared resources
across the group, the
managers at M&G are given
the freedom to run money
in the way that suits them
best, rather than having to
fit into a corporatelydefined
process.
Jane admits he is more
about market and timing
than most of the others
who are much more company
stock, management
and/or strategy-driven. He
describes his skills as
better suited to that of a
market practitioner, taking
a more qualitative approach,
than a stock selector,
which is why it makes
more sense for him to run
a macro fund.
“If I was graduating
today I would still recommend
the City but for very
different reasons,” he says.
“My expectation was that
being good at sums would
make me good at investment
and that is plainly not
the case.
l Human behaviour
“Computers can do the
sums. The tiny advantage,
if any, of being good with
numbers that has not been
completely replaced by the
ability of machines to do it
quicker is actually emotional
intelligence, understanding
markets and
human behaviour and how
human behaviour maps
onto the price of assets,
expectations and outcomes
22 PORTFOLIO ADVISER [www.portfolio-adviser.com] JANUARY 2010
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