Abby Glennie:
The Alpha Female in line for Nimmo’s throne

Having delivered long-term outperformance with her UK smaller company and mid-cap stock picks, Citywire AA-rated ‘Alpha female’ Abby Glennie has successfully established herself in the male-dominated investment industry.

Glennie has worked in fund management for 14 years, starting at Kames Capital before moving to Aberdeen Standard Investments (ASI) in Edinburgh six years ago. When she began her career, she would often go to events and be ‘the only woman out of 50 people and also one of the youngest too’. However, reassuringly she said, ‘I never felt like I wasn’t taken seriously’.

In fact, she believes being the solitary female was sometimes an advantage ‘because people notice you and they remember you’.

Glennie is certainly recognisable now, having climbed to the position of deputy head of smaller companies at ASI and as sole manager of the £88m Aberdeen Smaller Companies Income (ASCI) investment trust, as well as the ASI UK Opportunities Equity and ASI UK Mid-Cap Equity open-ended funds on which she works with co-manager Amanda Yeaman.

More significantly, after Harry Nimmo stepped back from his role as head of global smaller companies last year, Glennie was appointed his co-manager, working alongside the veteran investor on the £1.8bn ASI UK Smaller Companies fund, which AA-rated Nimmo had run solo since 1997, and the £759m Standard Life UK Smaller Companies (SLS) trust he had run since 2003.

This puts Glennie in pole position to succeed Nimmo as lead manager of the flagship smaller company funds when he retires. In 2015 Nimmo committed to run SLS for another seven years, meaning he could stop as early as next year.

That is not set in stone and, following the trust’s annual results this month, analysts at Numis Securities said ‘we understand that he is minded to continue to manage the fund beyond this which we believe is encouraging given his significant experience and long term track record’.

Glennie insisted there was ‘no distinct plan at the moment’ for the succession.

‘Nothing is decided, Harry is still enjoying his role and me and Amanda will be supportive of him and the longer he wants to work, the better,’ she said.  

If Glennie and Yeaman do take control of SLS in future, it will put them in a small percentage of women-only investment management teams.

Citywire’s annual Alpha Female report this month revealed just 0.6% of 16,000 open-ended funds around the world are run by women-only teams and just 5.6% are managed by a single woman. By contrast nearly 46% of funds are run by a single male manager.

Although the gender divide in fund management is stark, progress is being made with the growth in mixed teams of men and women with 18% of funds now run by diverse teams, a doubling in the number in six years.

ASI is a good example of this. Glennie’s eight-strong investment team has five women and three men.

‘A lot of skill sets that people would stereotypically associate with women are useful in investment management,’ said Glennie.  

‘The ability to multi-task, interpretation of data, and people say that women are better at reading body language.

‘You obviously need to research companies and do analysis and be inquisitive, but you also have to have social skills, not just with your team, but talking to senior people in different companies.’

She added: ‘It’s not all about numbers, so many more soft skills are needed.’

Glennie is an advocate of giving more women the opportunity to enter fund management, working with Girls Are Investors (GAIN), an organisation empowering women to take up jobs in finance.  

She used GAIN to help find candidates for an intern position at ASI and said it helped ‘to get a broad set of individuals to interview stage’.  

‘At the end of the day you will get the job if you interview well and have the skills the company needs, but the struggle is with the pool of people you actually get to see,’ she said.  

‘We had a “normal” pool of candidates and then those that came through the [GAIN] scheme.’

Glennie admitted that ‘things do take time to change’ in terms of gender diversity and said it may have helped that she is “Harry-approved”, having worked with the star fund manager for six years.  

But her performance speaks for itself. Glennie took on ASCI in March 2016. Although the £88m trust is comparatively small, it has delivered a big return from its portfolio of quality growth stocks. Over five years up to 14 September, including dividends, net asset value has grown 98%, beating the Numis Smaller Companies index return of 59%.

A re-rating in the stock – which has halved what was a 22% discount below NAV – has thrilled investors with a 130% shareholder total return. The shares have advanced 55% in the coronavirus rebound of the past 12 months.

That’s in line with SLS which has grown NAV by 129% and provided a shareholder return of 137% over five years.

A post-pandemic surge in UK stocks helped drive returns at both SLS and ASCI but performance has pulled back slightly this year thanks to the rotation into value names, and the bidding wars that have started in the mid and small-cap markets.

Glennie said the trusts have seen some positions bid for, including the £767m takeover of vodka producer Stock Spirits by private equity group CVC Capital; a move by Cobham to take over defence industry peer Ultra Electronics; and a £1bn bid for gaming group Sumo by Chinese internet giant Tencent.  

‘We have had some bids but not many because we tend to own quality growth and the bids have been more on the cyclical recovery names that had a tough period in the pandemic,’ said Glennie.  

‘We are seeing so many initial public offerings (IPOs) coming through – more IPOs than bids,’ she added.

One of the most recent flotations Glennie backed was Victoria Plumbing, which listed on the Alternative Investment Market (AIM) in June. Its £850m valuation made it the largest company to list on the AIM market and a surge in the shares saw it top £1bn on the first day of trading.  

Glennie – who invested in the stock with SLS – said it was impressive that founder Mark Radcliffe had launched the business ‘from his shed’ and it is ‘totally self-funded, with no private equity investors’.  

‘What Victoria Plumbing is good at is innovating in terms of embracing customers and being on top of trends, and working with the manufacturer base [to create on trend items],’ she said.  

Glennie also invested in maternity-wear group Seraphine, which listed in July with a value of £150m, through her ASCI trust.

A broader theme Glennie is buying into this year is digitalisation. The fact the Covid-19 pandemic accelerated online working, shopping, and socialising is well documented, but Glennie said she was looking for the online shift in more unusual places.  

‘We have quite a lot of companies across all sectors that are benefiting and not just the pure technology plays,’ she said.  

One area ripe for e-commerce is the auction industry and Glennie has tried to get ahead of the trend with a stake in Auction Technologies, which floated in February.  

‘The auction industry is quite behind in terms of adapting,’ she said. ‘Auction Technologies helps auction everything from agricultural equipment to art and antiques.

‘This is an industry you think should be online because everyone in the value chain will benefit but tractors are not something that you think about when you think about digitisation.’

While the Covid-19 outbreak has created opportunities it has also brought risks and Glennie believes one of the biggest risks is supply chain disruption.  

‘There are risks around the supply chain logistics challenges: already we’re seeing Nandos has no chicken and McDonald’s is out of milkshakes,’ she said.  

However, she said she was buying into companies that can benefit from their competitors’ supply chain issues, where the disparity between good and bad companies had widened.  

This includes building materials firm Marshalls, which has had problems sourcing sandstone from India but ‘it is looking at re-sourcing from Portugal and if it was a less strong company it wouldn’t be able to do that’.  

Logistics firm Clipper has also got ahead of the shortage of HGV drivers it foresaw as a result of Brexit, by investing in a training programme.

‘It takes two years and costs a lot of money [to train as a HGV driver] and what Clipper offers is a two-year programme but you can drive a type of fixed-bed truck after three months and work up from there,’ said Glennie.  

‘A weaker company would not have foreseen that issue and probably would not have had the balance sheet strength to invest in a training programme.’

Glennie hasn’t been immune to supply chain problems in her Income fund, and she admitted Avon Protection – formerly Avon Rubber – has been ‘challenging for us’.

The maker of respiratory equipment for the army and firefighters issued a profit warning as it suffered delays in sourcing product.

‘The challenge is in the supply chain availability of some materials and I think that won’t be the last company to issue a profit warning on the back of supply chain issues,’ she said.

While there are still problems to iron out for some UK-listed companies, Glennie said she was ‘more positive about the UK, and in particular mid and small-caps, than I have been for some time’.  

‘UK valuations are cheap relative to other markets and valuations are more attractive relative to large caps.

‘We have an each-way bet: we feel good about the space but we are interested in quality businesses that can grow even if there are headwinds.

‘If it is more of a rollercoaster recovery, or if we see more lockdowns, we will perform well because of our quality tilt,’ she explained.