Hunter Hall International chief executive David Buckland will leave the company this June to join Montgomery Investment Management (Montgomery IM) as chief executive and portfolio manager.
“I’ve had 11 years as CEO at Hunter Hall. I’ve accepted a job as the CEO at a company called Montgomery Investment Management, founded by Roger Montgomery,” Buckland told InvestorDaily.
Montgomery IM has been operating for 16 months and is 5 per cent owned by Magellan Financial Group.
Hunter Hall announced Buckland’s resignation last Tuesday in a company statement to the Australian Securities Exchange.
Buckland said he remains as chief of Hunter Hall but is in the “wind-down process” to finalise outstanding duties before hanging over the role to Michael Walsh in a month’s time.
“They’ve made Michael Walsh interim CEO, they’ll advertise externally for the CEO position and will invite one or two people internally to apply for it but how that evolves, I don’t know,” Buckland said.
Buckland said his decision to move across to Montgomery IM stems from his views about the company’s investment process.
“What it effectively does is promote a disciplined, consistent, repeatable and replicable process of bottom-up stock picking focused on high quality stocks that are selling at discounts to their intrinsic value,” he said.
“We’re very ambitious for [Montgomery IM] and transforming it into an excellent Australian-based boutique.”
Buckland’s exit is the second senior departure for the asset management firm, losing portfolio manager and deputy chief investment officer Jack Lowenstein in November 2011 after 14 years.
Meanwhile, Hunter Hall’s interim chief, Walsh told InvestorDaily he understands why Standard and Poor’s (S&P) placed six Hunter Hall equities funds “on hold” following the announcement of Buckland’s resignation.
“I can understand that the ratings houses look at a major departure as a significant issue – David is a loss, there’s no question about that,” Walsh said.
“When you lose a CEO that you’ve had for 11 years, you need to be in a position to use that as an opportunity to recover and refresh and I think we have a business model that’s very well-placed to do that.”
The Hunter Hall board will sit down with its researchers over the next month to discuss the depth of the portfolio management team, Walsh said.
“The other thing I think they’ll need time to digest is the quality of the new hires that we have [in] portfolio managers Jonathan Rabinovitz and Simon Bridger,” he said.
“There’s a lot of management depth and confidence.”
