That’s Anthony Bolton, of course.
Writing in Thursday’s FT, the nearest thing the UK has to a Warren Buffett-style investment guru, says we should learn to appreciate the activities of those fine upstanding citizens of W1:
Far from attempting to stamp them out or ignoring them and hoping they will go away, I believe that regulators should recognise the skill with which some hedge funds read the approaching disaster and try to learn something from them. The best hedge funds represent a body of well-informed investors who have done extensive work on the risks of both individual companies and the financial system as a whole. Perhaps most importantly, they have then invested large amounts of money behind their theses.
In fact the Fidelity man goes further, calling on the FSA and the Bank of England to hold regular, informal meetings, with the half dozen or so hedgies that really matter:
I believe it is essential that regulators have access to the thinking of the more successful hedge funds (there are probably only half a dozen or so that they would need to engage with) and I would encourage the FSA and the Bank of England to have regular informal meetings with them.
I would be surprised if these meetings did not provide extremely useful early warnings of problems ahead and they could, and should, be conducted behind closed doors.
I would take this argument one step further. For the regulator the most useful lessons can be learned from the extensive research that underpins the short-selling of financial stocks.
Hmmm. A rather different view to the one held by the European Commission, which wants to have rather more formal and intrusive discussions with the hedge fund community as some guy called Sam Jones has recently been reporting.
Related link:
Anthony “The Bull” Bolton – FT Alphaville