When Tony Nutt took over the Jupiter Income Fund in May 2000, “many intermediaries recommended selling”, says Mark Dampier of IFA Hargreaves Lansdown in The Daily Telegraph. His predecessor had been there since 1987, and they feared its performance would lag under the eye of his successor. “How wrong they were.” Since 2000 the fund has consistently beaten its benchmark, despite ballooning in size from £1.5bn to £4.2bn, thanks in part to its popularity among IFAs.
54-year-old Nutt has a total-return approach, concentrating “more on dividend growth than absolute yields”, he tells Fund Strategy. He likes telecoms stocks such as Vodafone and BT as he feels the businesses are undervalued. But he thinks returns are under pressure at the big drug makers, while banks will suffer from the credit crunch, which he tells The Independent could affect markets for a long time yet. “It’s clearly going to take a long time for this to work through – we are looking in the region of 18 months.”
But that didn’t stop him from snapping up Alliance & Leicester when the stock plunged in the wake of the Northern Rock crisis, before rebounding sharply the next morning. It’s canny moves like this, combined with the fact that he has already steered the fund through one bear market, that make Nutt a sought-after manager. “Tony Nutt is one of the very top UK equity managers,” says Neil Mumford on Citywire. “This should be considered as a core equity holding in all portfolios.”
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Jupiter Income fund’s top ten holdings
Name of holding, % of assets
BP, 6.47
Vodafone, 5.23
Royal Dutch Shell “B”, 3.95
Diageo, 3.24
Royal Bank of Scotland, 2.95
BT, 2.56
Rolls-Royce, 2.43
Persimmon, 2.17
BG Group, 2.15
Serco Group, 1.94