Fundsmith

Terry Smith

Terry Smith is an English fund manager who runs Fundsmith, the London investment firm he founded in 2010. He studied history at University College Cardiff, graduating with first-class honors in 1974, then spent the 1980s as a top-rated banking analyst at Barclays de Zoete Wedd before taking charge of UK company research at UBS Phillips & Drew. Those analyst years shaped him: he reads company accounts with suspicion. Fundsmith was born in 2010, when Smith stepped away from running Tullett Prebon, one of the world's largest inter-dealer brokers. His method is famously simple — buy good companies, don't overpay, and do nothing. He looks for high-quality businesses with durable competitive advantages and strong fundamentals, holds them for years with minimal turnover, and lets compounding do the work rather than trading in and out; the approach has brought him the nickname "The English Warren Buffett." The story that made his name came two decades before the firm. In 1992, while head of UK research at UBS, Smith published Accounting for Growth, exposing misleading accounting practices that had masked problems at big British firms such as Polly Peck. The book was such a hit that it displaced Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time from the bestseller charts — and it got Smith fired after he refused his employer's request to withdraw it. He has been a sharp critic of excessive fees and portfolio turnover in the industry ever since.