The Greats · Life and times

Anthony Bolton: the contrarian

Anthony Bolton started as a graduate trainee at a small London merchant bank in 1971 and went on to run Fidelity Special Situations for 28 years, one of the best records in British fund management. A late return to run money in China ended on a more mixed note, and he has since spent much of his time writing operas.

  • 1950–
  • Fidelity Special Situations; Fidelity China Special Situations
  • Contrarian company research
Graphite-style head-and-shoulders illustrated portrait of Anthony Bolton.

Anthony Bolton was born on 7 March 1950 and read engineering at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he also studied composition with the composer Nicholas Maw, so that the two interests that would occupy the rest of his life were both in place before he had settled on a career. Music stayed a private pursuit for the next thirty years, whereas investing became the job, and he arrived in the City in 1971 as a graduate trainee at Keyser Ullmann, a small merchant bank that mainly managed investment trusts.

He worked his way into the firm's investment department, but its routine did not suit him and he left before Keyser Ullmann ran into the difficulties that overtook it in the secondary banking crisis of the mid-1970s. In 1976 he moved to Schlesingers, a South African-owned investment firm in London, where he became a portfolio manager for the first time and helped to run a fund that invested in special situations, meaning companies going through a change that the market had not yet priced properly.

The decision that shaped his career came in 1979, when Fidelity, a privately owned American fund group that had never sold a fund in Britain, set up a London office to launch its first funds for UK investors and recruited the 29-year-old Anthony Bolton as one of its first two London-based investment managers. He joined on 17 December 1979, a few months after Margaret Thatcher's first election victory, and Fidelity Special Situations was launched the same month with him in charge of a fund that, by his own later account, started with roughly £2m.

Graphite-style head-and-shoulders illustrated portrait of Anthony Bolton.
Illustrated portrait of Anthony Bolton. AI-generated graphite artwork from the existing series; not a photograph of a specific event. Illustration: Equity & Markets Insight, AI-generated.

The fund's name described what Anthony Bolton was looking for, because he purchased companies that were out of favour, recovering from problems, being reorganised or likely to be taken over, at a time when few other investors wanted them, and sold them once the rest of the market had come round to his view. "I've had a contrarian approach, but I've known that that's something that works for me," said Mr Bolton in a series of short videos recorded for Fidelity in 2016. "The dangerous thing I think, is to do what everyone else is doing." Jonathan Davis, who wrote a book about him, noted that he never used borrowing or derivatives to add to the fund's returns.

Two habits ran through the whole of his career, the first being to meet companies in large numbers, with Anthony Bolton keeping handwritten notes so that he could compare what a management team said with what it had told him at earlier meetings, because a story that kept changing was, in his experience, a warning in itself. The second was the use of share price charts as a check on his own fundamental view rather than as a forecast, and he wrote in his 2009 book that "one of the great disciplines of technical analysis is that it forces you to cut losses and let profits run". He also learned the hard way that "some of the worst mistakes I made was investing in companies with weak balance sheets".

From November 1985 Fidelity also gave him its European Fund, followed by the European Growth fund in 1990, the Fidelity European Values investment trust in 1991 and the Fidelity Special Values trust, which started with £44m in October 1994, so that for more than a decade he was running UK and European money at the same time. The record was not smooth, however, because he had three poor years around the recession of the early 1990s, when holdings in Polly Peck and Parkfield were caught up in the collapse of both companies, and at the end of that decade he declined to purchase internet shares and underperformed for a couple of years until the bubble burst in 2000. These were periods of underperformance within a long record rather than permanent losses, a distinction worth keeping when 28 years are reduced to a single compound rate.

Graphite drawing of an anonymous person carrying a briefcase towards an office on a London street.
Conceptual illustration of London’s investment world in the late 1970s. The figure is anonymous and the entrance is not identified as Fidelity’s office. Illustration: Equity & Markets Insight, AI-generated.

Anthony Bolton was not normally a public campaigner, which made the events of October 2003 unusual. Carlton Communications and Granada were about to merge to form ITV plc, and Michael Green, the founder and chairman of Carlton, was to become chairman of the combined company. Fidelity, led by Anthony Bolton, assembled a group of institutions including Legal & General, Schroders, Standard Life Investments and UBS Global Asset Management, which between them held around 36% of Carlton and 33% of Granada, and demanded that Michael Green give up the role so that an independent chairman could be found from outside the two companies. Carlton's board refused and warned that a change of management could threaten the £4.2bn merger, but Granada's board withheld its support and within days Michael Green had agreed to step down from the ITV role. The episode earned Anthony Bolton the nickname of the quiet assassin, and he later told the journalist Ian Fraser that news of the campaign had been leaked by others, because in his view such efforts worked better behind the scenes.

By 2006 the fund had become the largest open-ended fund in Britain, holding around £6bn, and there was a widespread worry that it had become too big for the kind of smaller, unloved companies on which the record had been built. Fidelity's answer, announced in June 2006, was to split it, so that Anthony Bolton kept the UK half as Fidelity Special Situations until his planned retirement at the end of 2007, while the other half became Fidelity Global Special Situations in September 2006 under Jorma Korhonen, a Finnish manager at the firm. "Were I starting out today, I would be looking to run a global, not a UK Special Situations fund," said Mr Bolton at the time.

The record he left at the end of December 2007 is the one on which his reputation rests. Over the 28 years from launch, Fidelity Special Situations returned 19.5% a year, compounded, against around 13.5% a year for the FTSE All-Share index, so that £1,000 invested at launch had grown to roughly £147,000 by the time he stepped down, according to the Daily Telegraph's report that month. On the usual basis for unit trust figures, the fund's return is the one received after the fund's own charges with income reinvested and the index figure includes dividends, so the gap of around six percentage points a year is a fair measure of what he added. However, it is a record of the past and not a forecast, and it ends in December 2007, because the results of Sanjeev Shah, who took over in January 2008, and of Alex Wright, who has run the fund since January 2014, belong to them.

Anthony Bolton stayed at Fidelity after 2007 to mentor its younger managers and analysts, and in April 2009 he published "Investing Against the Tide", an account of how he had run money. The retirement did not last, however, because he had been investing in Chinese shares since 2004, and in November 2009 Fidelity announced that he would move to Hong Kong to run a new China fund. "I firmly believe that China is the investment opportunity of the next decade," said Mr Bolton. Fidelity China Special Situations, an investment trust rather than an open-ended fund, was launched on 19 April 2010 at 100p a share, with 460m shares in issue and net assets of £455.8m after the costs of the issue, one of the largest investment trust launches there had been. The shares went straight to a premium to net asset value, which is unusual for a trust, and a further issue of C shares raised £166.25m in February 2011.

Hong Kong Island’s illuminated skyline across Victoria Harbour.
Hong Kong Island’s skyline, photographed on 5 August 2011, during Bolton’s tenure at Fidelity China Special Situations. “Hong Kong Island Skyline 201108.jpg” — momo from Hong Kong; CC BY 3.0. No crop or content alteration; web copies are resized and format-converted only.

The first year went well enough, because from launch to 31 March 2011 the net asset value per share returned 5.2% and the share price 10.0%, against 3.3% for the MSCI China index in sterling, whereas the second year did not. In the six months to 30 September 2011 the net asset value fell by 28.9%, against a fall of 24.5% in the index, and by November 2011 the shares were trading at 78p. "I can give no excuses except to say performance has been very disappointing," Mr Bolton told shareholders, adding that his optimism about China had been "severely tested". The portfolio was tilted towards smaller companies and consumer businesses, which lagged as China's economy slowed, and the trust was geared by between 20% and 25%, which magnified the falls, so that for the year to 31 March 2012 the net asset value returned −18.5% and the share price −26.4%, against −12.5% for the index. "I admit I am not where I had hoped to be," he wrote in that year's report.

He had always said the appointment was for a fixed term, and in April 2012 he extended it to April 2014, arguing that cutting gearing after a period of underperformance was "one of the worst mistakes" a manager could make because "you miss out on the rebound". The rebound did come, because the net asset value returned 15.7% in the year to 31 March 2013 and 19.5% in the year to 31 March 2014, the latter against a fall of 6.9% in the index, and by the time he handed the trust to Dale Nicholls on 1 April 2014 the net asset value had returned 18.6% since launch, against −5.7% for the MSCI China index. However, the share price had returned just 6.3% over the same period, because the shares had gone from a premium at launch to a discount of 9.6% at the end, so that a shareholder who had purchased at the start received around a third of what the portfolio itself had earned. When he announced his retirement in June 2013 he said that "I do not regret it at all", and in his final report he was more specific: "Perhaps my biggest mistake over the last four years has been my optimism about the overall Chinese stock market." The trust's later rise under Dale Nicholls is not part of Anthony Bolton's record.

Anthony Bolton: two different chapters. Special Situations annualised returns over 28 years beside China Special Situations cumulative returns over about four years. Sources: Fidelity’s UK record as cited in the article; Fidelity China Special Situations annual report 2014. China: sterling total returns, income reinvested. The UK fee / reinvestment basis is not fully specified in the quoted source. Left panel is per year; right panel is a whole-period gain or loss, not annualised.
Special Situations annualised returns over 28 years beside China Special Situations cumulative returns over about four years. Sources: Fidelity’s UK record as cited in the article; Fidelity China Special Situations annual report 2014. China: sterling total returns, income reinvested. The UK fee / reinvestment basis is not fully specified in the quoted source. Left panel is per year; right panel is a whole-period gain or loss, not annualised. Graphic: Equity & Markets Insight. Data and source qualifications: see the article.

Anthony Bolton served as a director of Fidelity International from 2014 to 2024, with the title of president of investments, and he has continued to speak about how he worked, telling an audience at the Library of Mistakes in Edinburgh in November 2024 that what separated a good manager from an average one was not the size of the winners but the avoidance of mistakes, and that the first question he asked of any idea was whether he was early or late.

Music, which had waited for thirty years, came to the fore after he resumed composition lessons in 2002 with Colin Matthews and Julian Anderson. In 2014, as he left Hong Kong, he began a two-act opera, "The Life and Death of Alexander Litvinenko", with a libretto by Kit Hesketh-Harvey, which was first staged at Grange Park Opera in Surrey on 15 July 2021, and a second opera, "Island of Dreams", based on "The Tempest" and made with Sir David Pountney, followed at Grange Park Opera in July 2024. Through his family's Boltini Trust he has funded Music Patron, a website that connects British composers with people willing to support their work. He is married with three children, lives in West Sussex, and in May 2026 was still appearing before investment professionals in London to talk about a career that began with £2m in December 1979.

The record

Fund and periodMeasureFundBenchmark
Fidelity Special Situations, December 1979 to December 2007Annualised return, 28 years19.5% a yearFTSE All-Share, around 13.5% a year
Fidelity Special Situations, 17 December 1979 to 1 January 2008Growth of £1,000 (FE Analytics)£142,240–
Fidelity China Special Situations, launch to 31 March 2011Cumulative total returnNAV +5.2%; share price +10.0%MSCI China (sterling) +3.3%
Fidelity China Special Situations, year to 31 March 2012Total returnNAV −18.5%; share price −26.4%MSCI China −12.5%
Fidelity China Special Situations, year to 31 March 2013NAV total return+15.7%–
Fidelity China Special Situations, year to 31 March 2014Total returnNAV +19.5%; share price +14.1%MSCI China −6.9%
Fidelity China Special Situations, 19 April 2010 to 31 March 2014Cumulative total return, whole tenureNAV +18.6%; share price +6.3%MSCI China −5.7%

The Special Situations figures are Fidelity's own, as cited by Morningstar in 2009 and by the Daily Telegraph in December 2007; the 19.5% is a compound annual rate and, on the normal basis for unit trust performance, is the return to a unit holder after the fund's charges with income reinvested, against a FTSE All-Share total return including dividends, although Fidelity's published statement of the figure does not spell out the basis. The Daily Telegraph put the growth of £1,000 at roughly £147,000, whereas FE Analytics, using slightly different dates and data, put it at £142,240; the difference does not alter the picture. The China figures are from the trust's annual reports and are sterling total returns with income reinvested; the launch price was 100p and the NAV at launch 99.01p, and the difference between the NAV and share price returns reflects the move from a premium at launch to a discount of 9.6% at 31 March 2014. None of these figures includes successor managers, and none is a forecast.

Life in dates

  1. 1950Born on 7 March.
  2. 1971Joins Keyser Ullmann as a graduate trainee after reading engineering at Trinity College, Cambridge.
  3. 1976Moves to Schlesingers and becomes a portfolio manager for the first time.
  4. 1979Joins Fidelity in London on 17 December as one of its first two London-based investment managers; Fidelity Special Situations is launched the same month.
  5. 1985Takes on Fidelity European Fund in November, which he runs until December 2002.
  6. 1990Begins running Fidelity European Growth, until 2003.
  7. 1991Fidelity European Values investment trust is launched in November with him as manager, until 2001.
  8. 1994Fidelity Special Values investment trust is launched in October with £44m, which he runs until December 2007.
  9. 2002Resumes composition studies with Colin Matthews and Julian Anderson.
  10. 2003Leads the shareholder group that forces Michael Green to give up the chairmanship of the merged ITV in October; Sir Peter Burt takes up the post in March 2004.
  11. 2006Fidelity Special Situations, by then around £6bn, is split in September; "A Garland of Carols" is premiered at St Paul's Cathedral.
  12. 2007Steps down from Fidelity Special Situations and Fidelity Special Values at the end of December; Sanjeev Shah takes over in January 2008.
  13. 2009"Investing Against the Tide" is published in April; in November Fidelity announces his return to run a China fund.
  14. 2010Moves to Hong Kong; Fidelity China Special Situations is launched on 19 April at 100p, raising £460m.
  15. 2011C share issue raises £166.25m in February; the NAV falls 28.9% in the six months to 30 September.
  16. 2012Extends his tenure to April 2014.
  17. 2013Announces in June that he will retire in April 2014.
  18. 2014Hands the trust to Dale Nicholls on 1 April; becomes a director of Fidelity International, a post he holds until 2024; begins the Litvinenko opera.
  19. 2021"The Life and Death of Alexander Litvinenko" is first performed at Grange Park Opera on 15 July.
  20. 2024"Island of Dreams" is performed at Grange Park Opera on 11 and 13 July; speaks at the Library of Mistakes in Edinburgh on 21 November.
  21. 2026Appears in conversation at a CFA UK event in London on 6 May.

Sources

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