Market Update 13th July 2026

I am not alone

I came across a piece recently which talked about fund managers and the received wisdom about whether they should invest money “like it is their own” and should they also have all or substantially all their liquid wealth in their fund? This led me to think we should look at how aligned Emily and I are with the Hawksmoor fund selections.

In my early days one of the first things I looked at in the fund world was a group of listed hedge funds of funds which don’t exist anymore having not survived the financial crisis. As part of this work I also used to meet some open ended, offshore hedge funds of funds and some single strategy funds. We were never likely to buy these, but they provided some background and context for the listed ones.

A box ticking question was always – are you invested in the fund yourself? The right answer being obviously yes, but it is not that simple. In those days, a lot of hedge funds were launched on the back of a few good years on a proprietary trading desk at say Goldman Sachs and you would take your multi-million pound bonus and some seed money and set yourself up as a long-short equity hedge fund. Now you are invested in the fund and ticking that box. Eighteen months later it all blows up, you go back to Goldman Sachs, your investors do not and were never as aligned as they might have thought.

An amount of money in the fund does show some intent, but there are many issues that determine true alignment of interests. One is career risk. I am unlikely to sack myself from running my SIPP. I do tell myself it is not guaranteed and I might, but I will allow it is unlikely. This is the main investment vehicle I use but it is only one part of my overall pension. My previous employer was too small to run a bigger workplace pension, so they just used to give us the money and leave us to it, and this became my SIPP.

I used to have several legacy platform pension schemes from previous jobs which I have recently consolidated into the live Hawksmoor one and this has a bit more structure, which affects how I treat the SIPP. The SIPP is a bucket of what I hope are the best ideas from the Hawksmoor fund buy-list. We don’t have to go through compliance to buy open ended funds, but we do if it is an equity or an investment trust, so this makes it easier.

The Hawksmoor funds are now mingled with the remaining best ideas from the previous role where we invested very differently, but I took the same approach of trying to cherry pick what I saw as the best ideas at the time and happily this included equities and investment trusts, so I have a mix. I couldn’t tell you how much of the SIPP is in the US or the UK or whatever but wouldn’t run the entire pension like this and I happen to know Emily does something similar.

A second issue is at Hawksmoor we work as a team – not just Emily and I, but we share and collaborate with the Hawksmoor funds team, the Hawksmoor model teams and we fit what we do into the asset allocation process which we are part of.

At Hawksmoor we are aiming to invest for the long term – I do this in my SIPP as well. Many things have been in there well over a decade since it started and I don’t change the Hawksmoor funds around much. I mostly just add new ones as they come along.

I have managed funds myself in the past as well and while sometimes you do have to make changes, the default plan was to leave it alone once in place and apply this to the SIPP as well. There is one fund I added and later decided I had made a mistake, and it came off our buy-list, and I sold it out of the SIPP as well.

Although we are aiming for the long term, we do have a large quarterly and smaller monthly reporting cycle which has to be addressed, and I think does have an impact. We can tell ourselves it shouldn’t but in reality, it probably does.

But when it comes to the SIPP, I couldn’t even hazard a guess at the Q2 2026 performance and nor do I lie awake at night wondering if it is a bit better or worse than ARC (our peer group performance comparator, which I spend a lot of time worrying about during the day). What I look at from time to time is how much money is in it and what I think my retirement experience might be as a result.

I would say I take the same funds we recommend at Hawksmoor but apply them in a more chaotic and unconstrained way than Hawksmoor does. I don’t have to explain it to myself or the FCA. Okay sometimes I have some explaining to do and there is an AIM listed biotech company from the previous job that I don’t like to talk about, but not usually. Even this raises a more serious point that being active investors ourselves means we can sometimes learn lessons without impairing the clients.

It raises a second more serious point that we often behave differently when we think no one is watching. Had the AIM biotech company been in client portfolios, I would have been more or less forced to act differently with a lot of people looking at it – for better or for worse.

The company had developed an innovative, non-invasive blood test for various cancers and the shares rose on a steady stream of good news – successful trials, regulatory approval getting nearer, a potentially wider addressable market as trials showed it could test for a wider range of different cancers than first thought. The test was cheap, easily distributable and solved a known problem. Testing and medical devices can be somewhat safer and more predictable than drug development.

Space and embarrassment mean I can’t go into all the details of exactly what happened next, but one issue that is relevant here is multiple dilutive equity raises by the company. At Hawksmoor we are not just part of a bigger investment team, but we are well supported on many sides including our admin team who notify us of these corporate actions. Holding the stock in a SIPP, I sometimes haven’t even known they were happening, never mind taken part and this would not happen to a Hawksmoor client.

It has been a near perfect storm of behavioural trauma when holding a stock. It went up a lot, it has regulatory approval, the product works, but they have still struggled to commercialise it. I have honestly no idea what I would have done if it had been in client portfolios and mostly just glad it wasn’t.

Emily and I do not run a fund so it’s not as simple as saying do we buy it. If we did run one, we absolutely would. We do run some internal models which are also not available to buy but again if they were we would.

As I write there are 80 active funds on the Hawksmoor buy-list. It is not practical for Emily and I to own all of them and nor does any individual client. They are there to fulfil a range of different mandates and circumstances.

My SIPP doesn’t look exactly like a Hawksmoor moderately adventurous portfolio for example but there are lots of circumstantial reasons why not. But in the ways that matter and the parts we are directly responsible for, Emily and I are not asking anyone to do anything we don’t or wouldn’t do ourselves.

Robert Fullerton – Senior Research Analyst

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