Hugh Hendry

Hugh Hendry is the founding partner and, at various times, the chief investment officer, chief executive officer and chief portfolio manager of Eclectica Asset Management. He began to attract attention when his fund achieved a 31.2 per cent positive return in 2008 in the depths of the financial crisis, earning him a reputation as a contrarian investor, but his claim on wider public notice was based in a series of outspoken media appearances. Hendry has been referred to as "the most high-profile Scot" in the hedge fund sector.

Hendry once said to an interviewer: "To my mind, the three most important principles when it comes to investing are Albert Camus's principles of ethics: God is dead, life is absurd and there are no rules." He suggested that a great fund manager was defined by "an ability to establish a contentious premise outside the existing belief system, and have it go on and be adopted by the rest of the financial community".

Hendry was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1969 and graduated from Strathclyde University in 1990 with a BA in economics and finance. His father worked as a lorry driver and he was the first member of his family to go to university.

In 1991 Hendry joined the prestigious Edinburgh investment management firm, Baillie Gifford. He claimed that he was hired only because investors had instructed the company to recruit more working-class employees.

After Baillie Gifford he worked for Credit Suisse Asset Management. Following a chance meeting with Crispin Odey, Hendry joined Odey Asset Management in 1999. "It was a meeting of minds," Hendry said. "He checked my references, got the message that I was a troublemaker, and said, 'You're one of us, you're one of the pirates'."

He learned the art of "momentum investing" and was responsible for managing a range of funds from the Eclectica Fund to more than a $1 billion of long only European mandates, including the award-winning Odey Continental European Fund. "(Odey) taught me how to manage money," Hendry said. "More than that, he taught me how to misbehave. Misbehaviour is all about curiosity, how you invoke and think about change, which is very necessary in the management of money."

Eclectica Asset Management was founded in 2005 when Hendry and his colleague Simon Batten purchased the management contract of the Eclectica Fund from Odey to establish themselves as a stand-alone fund manager. "A lot of people define investors as value or growth. We are neither. We are time investors," Hendry said.

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Wikipedia