His entire career has been spent at the task of picking fund managers, usually running fund-of-fund strategies.
That is a type of product which has fallen from favour with advisers and their clients in recent years, largely supplanted by model portfolio services.
He says multi-manager strategies have suffered from having fee structures that were deemed expensive, but also not aligned enough with the risk profiles of clients.
Caddick began his career as a fund buyer at a private client wealth management firm, before taking roles at F&C, Santander and LV Asset Management.
At the latter he helped set up the retail investment management business from scratch, and left when it was sold.
He joined Nedgroup as head of investments in 2021, and became the managing director in 2023. Nedgroup regards itself as a start-up within the UK market.
He says a key reason for wanting to join Nedgroup was the opportunity to build up a business, having immediately prior to that worked at Santander, a division of a very large bank, which at the time he left had assets under management of £22bn.
In terms of where he sees the growth coming from for his current operation, he says it will be a mixture of hiring individual managers and outsourcing to third-party firms, though he expects the hiring of individual managers to be a particularly strong source of growth.
Pieces of the pie
Caddick says the skill of a fund manager contributes only 1 per cent to 2 per cent of the total return available to an investor, with the rest coming simply from the returns generated by individual asset classes.
In such a world, how does he feel a new entrant can compete with established incumbents? He believes the key to this may come from the way the market has changed.
Caddick says that, over the decade he has worked within the industry, the gap in terms of sophistication and investment knowledge between the institutional, the retail and advised clients has narrowed, with the latter client group becoming more sophisticated.
This may represent an opportunity for newer firms, he says, because it means a larger number of potential clients, even for smaller firms, as clients will be more open to investment strategies run by lesser known firms rather than in thrall to big brands.
He says: “We put out video content, which we hope is quite snappy, for clients to see, and there are more clients now willing and able to engage with that sort of content. That means we have to keep evolving how we speak with clients, and we have to be humble about how we do it.”
