Jenkins expands research team with senior Credit Suisse hire

Jenkins Investment Management has strengthened its research and portfolio management capabilities with the recruitment of a Credit Suisse broker, who in an earlier life was a journalist.

Lachlan Drummond, whose early career included financial reporting with the Sydney Morning Herald, had been at Credit Suisse – or the firm’s predecessors in Australia – since 1986. He was previously a top-rated media analyst, but in recent years branched out into general small caps. Most recently he was head of Credit Suisse’s small companies research team and deputy head of research overall. David Aylward, Jenkins’ managing director, said Drummond’s recruitment should add substantially to the firm’s research effort, given Drummond’s depth of experience as a stock analyst. He would work closely with Aylward on the management of the Jenkins small-cap fund as well as playing an important role in both small and large-cap research. The hiring takes the number of investment professionals at Jenkins to seven, who are supported by four other staff. Drummond said he had often thought about moving into funds management as a new challenge. He said that about two-thirds of the process was the same for both buy-side and sell-side analysts – the parts to do with gathering information and thinking through the ideas. The rest was to do with portfolio construction. Funds managers, also, could devote the time that brokers take in selling their ideas to clients to other things, such as refining their ideas. Aylward said that the biggest cultural difference between the two types of analysts was that brokers always tended to feel that they needed to “win the argument” whereas in funds management it was more about “getting the decision right”.