The fund that trebled investors' money by backing Britain's smallest companies: INVESTING SHOW

The fund that trebled investors’ money by backing Britain’s smallest companies: INVESTING SHOW

Published on: June 11, 2025

Richard Staveley manager of Rockwood Strategic says shares are still cheap

By SIMON LAMBERT

Updated: 11:29 BST, 11 June 2025

Smaller companies in the UK offer one of the best opportunities to investors in a long time, says the manager behind the top performing investment trust over the past five years.

Rockwood Strategic has trebled investors money since June 2020, but manager Richard Staveley says that Britain’s smallest listed companies are still going cheap.

He speaks to Simon Lambert on this episode of the Investing Show, to discuss how his investment philosophy, how Rockwood Strategic invests and reveal the thinking behind some of the companies it currently holds.

Rockwood Strategic has achieved a 198 per cent total return over the past five years, putting it top of the UK smaller companies sector, according to AIC figures, with its value approach to picking shares paying off.

He highlights how the trust even bought two companies for less than the cash on their balance sheets.

By comparison to Rockwood Strategic’s performance, the FTSE All Share is up 42.3 per cent over five years, while the much better performing US stock market index, the S&P 500, is up 98 per cent.

The £116million investment trust holds 24 companies and Richard says this concentrated approach means it can adopt the Warren Buffett-style principle of focusing on your best investment ideas.

He says Rockwood Strategic works closely with the companies it holds and that ‘if you rang up any of the CEOs, they would say we are one of their most engaged investors’.

Richard says: ‘A lot of investing these days has gone passive and I think there’s a decreasing role for investors like myself to just sit on wide portfolios of stocks.

‘To prove why it’s worth having us, we need to do things that the computers can’t do, have a concentration, and take active risk and get involved.’

Rockwood Strategic

Sector: UK smaller companies

Size: £116million

Ongoing charges: 1.58%

One-year performance: -0.1%

Three-year performance: 95.8%

Five-year performance: 198.1%

Figures from AIC / Morningstar to 9 June 2025

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