It’s not immediately obvious why the world’s largest listed hedge fund manager sponsors the Man Booker literary prize. While there are plenty of creative minds at Man Group, there can be little in the way of fiction. If there was, of course, investors would be pushing the “sell” button as quick as you like.
The attraction of Man for a stock market investor is that it should offer exposure to the kind of high-performance hedge fund strategies that would otherwise cost you tens of thousands of pounds to get into directly. Man is also a considerably more diverse asset manager than it was, so theoretically there should be the additional cushion of more conventional buy-and-hold strategies and investments in emerging markets and debt securities.
Though