Who are the fund managers you rate highly?
Chances are you’ll probably list the likes of Neil Woodford, Terry Smith and Nick Train, alongside a few names now retired like Anthony Bolton.
Now give me the name of a female fund manager? Struggling? That’s not because there aren’t any good female fund managers out there, in fact many top performing funds are run by women.
But it is a well-established fact that when it comes to investment management, the female fund manager is a rare breed.
Henderson’s Jenna Barnard is a bond investor
Jenna Barnard joined Henderson in 2002 as a credit analyst. Two years later she had progressed to a credit portfolio manager. Today she is co-head of Strategic Fixed Income at the company.
The Henderson Preference & Bond Fund is a strategic bond fund and just one of five funds managed by Barnard and co-manager John Pattullo.
The fund’s objective is to provide a quarterly income payment by investing in mixture of different bonds.
Unsurprisingly, the average investor in this fund is in their mid-seventies and for these people income is key.
Barnard is a boffin on bonds and stresses that as bond investor her focus is on income but she also aims to preserve capital for her investors.
Maike Currie is Investment Director at Fidelity International and the author of The Search for Income – an investor’s guide to income-paying investments. The views expressed are her own. @MaikeCurrie