Lord Spencer is donating £20,000 to the Royal Osteoporosis Society after winning a wager against his arch-rival, the well-known fund manager Terry Smith.
Michael Spencer is the man who built Nex Group, formerly ICAP, from scratch, turning it into one of the world’s biggest inter-dealer brokers.
He is making the donation after promising a year ago to hand the money to a charity supported by The Mail on Sunday if his Nutshell Growth Fund outperformed the Fundsmith Equity fund, Smith’s flagship, in 2024.
He said the Nutshell fund, run by Mark Ellis, did even better than he had hoped. Nutshell Asset Management was founded in 2019 and uses a model developed in-house that mingles artificial intelligence (AI) with human judgment.
Spencer earlier this year increased his stake in the operating company, Nutshell Asset Management, from 25 per cent to just over 40 per cent and took the role of chairman last month.
He is also a big investor in the £69 million Growth Fund itself, having put in £20 million during the year alongside significant equity investment in the management company and other strategic commitments, totalling £60 million.
Wager: Lord Spencer, right, with Ruth Sunderland and fund boss Mark Ellis
In the summer, total fees on the fund for the cheapest share class were slashed from 1.55 to 0.85 per cent. Small investors can put in lump sums starting at £100, or £25 for regular monthly savings.
‘It is designed to be for everyone, not just for the big boys,’ Spencer added.
The Nutshell fund has returned 23.8 per cent so far this year, compared with 10.7 per cent to the end of November at Fundsmith. It has returned 160 per cent since launch.
Terry Smith is a hugely successful fund manager thanks to his strategy of backing growth stocks. He now lives in Mauritius.
Fundsmith has been a stellar performer over the long term with a return of 619 per cent since it was founded in 2010.
It returned 12.4 per cent in 2023, compared with 26.47 per cent from Nutshell.
In 2022, which was a rough year for markets, Fundsmith came out better, with a loss of 13.8 per cent compared to Nutshell’s loss of 19.16 per cent.
A former Conservative Party treasurer, Spencer also described Keir Starmer’s Labour Government as ‘the most socialist administration this country has ever had by a significant margin’.
He is ‘very pessimistic’ about Labour’s economic policies and says he believes the Government has ‘no hope of generating the economic growth that it has spoken about’.
‘I forecast economic growth in the UK will remain – on a per capita basis – at derisory levels and that is a very sad outlook,’ he said. ‘Sadly, there are no grounds for hope under Starmer and Chancellor Rachel Reeves.’
He called on Ministers to abolish stamp duty on share trading to revitalise the City.
‘The UK is the only big market in the world where we still have stamp duty, and turnover in shares is lower today than 20 years ago,’ he said.
He also hit out at the current craze for cryptocurrency, saying: ‘We would never invest in bitcoin. It doesn’t generate a dividend and there never will be a dividend.
‘At some point, I have no idea when, the bubble will burst.’
This newspaper has campaigned with the Royal Osteoporosis Society to roll out diagnostic services for the debilitating bone disease across the UK.
Spencer said: ‘The Mail on Sunday’s osteoporosis campaign is very convincing, very powerful and a wonderful idea.’
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