Somerset Capital Management
 Somerset Capital Management    | |
|---|---|
| Founder | • Dominic Johnson • Jacob Rees-Mogg • Edward Robertson |
Somerset Capital Management (SCM) was founded in 2007 as a specialist Global Emerging Markets investment management firm.[1] SCM was co-founded by Dominic Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Edward Robertson, who were colleagues at Lloyd George Asset Management in Hong Kong before leaving to found SCM.
In September 2022, SCM with assets under management of about $5 billion was up for sale, with Dominic Johnson planning to move into politics, and would be succeeded by chief operating officer Robert Diggle as CEO.[2]
In October 2022, Business Minister Jacob Rees-Mogg was caught up in a cronyism row after his business partner and SCM co-founder Dominic Johnson was appointed a Minister in the Liz Truss' government.[3]
Own words
Somerset Capital Management comprises of 48 members of staff including an investment team of over 22 investment managers and analysts based in London, Singapore and Shanghai. SCM is structured as an employee-owned partnership. We believe in co-investment, we cap our funds and we prefer to focus on performance above asset gathering.[4]
2018 annus horribilis
According to Dominic Johnson, 2018 was the toughest for SCM since the 2008 financial crisis, as emerging markets were pummelled by the escalating US-China trade war, while Turkey was mired in a financial crisis.
For the first time since its launch in 2007, SCM had net outflows, accounting for less than 10 per cent of assets, and its flagship fund, the £927m Emerging Markets Dividend Growth fund, was down 15.5 per cent in 2018 compared with a 9.3 per cent fall for its benchmark. Dominic Johnson said:
“2018 was a dreadful year.
“It clearly didn’t have the global magnitude and ramifications of the global financial crisis but from an emerging market point of view it was very traumatic because no one saw it coming and the peak to trough was 30 per cent roughly.”
This annus horribilis prompted a pep talk from Dominic Johnson: “In January 2019 I just said to the team, ‘we’ve got a phenomenally stable business on the whole, we’ve come through this with $7.5bn, this is the floor and from here I feel very optimistic with the flagship fund up 14.6 per cent, compared with a 10.7 per cent rise for its benchmark.
“We’ve had to nickel-and-dime for every bit of alpha and really work hard. It’s a totally different environment to how most asset classes have performed since the crash.”[5]
Related Document
| Title | Type | Publication date | Author(s) | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Document:How to profit from an engineered economic decline and crisis | Article | 28 September 2022 | Robert Bryson | How do you profit from an engineered economic decline and crisis? Simple really – acquire and give inside information to the hedge funders, who fund your leadership campaign! |
