Lindsell Train

Nick Train

Nick Train is co-founder and chairman of Lindsell Train, the London investment firm he started in 2000 with Michael Lindsell. A Modern History graduate of Queen's College, Oxford, Train walked into investing with no formal finance or maths training — he has joked he is "three-quarters of the way to being innumerate." He began at GT Management in 1981, where founder Richard Thornton took a chance on him and became a mentor Train describes as a "charismatic, mercurial, borderline genius." Over 17 years he rose to chief investment officer for Pan-Europe before GT's sale to Invesco in 1998 and a two-year stint as head of global equities at M&G. Train and Lindsell had been colleagues for eight years at GT when they set out on their own. Frustrated with the "institutional imperatives" of managing money inside large firms, they wanted a simple, low-hierarchy shop free to think in decades. Lindsell Train still invests that way: a concentrated portfolio of a couple of dozen businesses, held for very long stretches with barely any trading. Train looks for companies with durable brands and loyal customers — Diageo, Burberry and Nintendo have been recurring names — businesses he likes to call "preferably immortal" franchises, and he does not press management to change how they run things, preferring to let compound growth do its work over years.