Dan Brocklebank, UK head at Orbis Investments, talks to FTAdviser about the challenges of investing amid uncertain political climates, a time when Blairite policies were "fresh and ambitious", and why financial regulators need to steer clear of "uncharted territory".
Brocklebank says: "I loved studying economics at school and wanted to carry on doing that at university. During my A-levels I came across a sponsorship scheme offered by accountancy firm Arthur Andersen.
They put school leavers on their graduate training programme for eight months during their gap year before university and then gave them a travel grant, plus some sponsorship, as well as work opportunities through university.
Although it wasn’t compulsory to work for them after university, they made it pretty attractive. I was in their tax department, which had some brilliant minds working in it so I knew it would be intellectually interesting.
I wasn’t really cut out for it long-term, but I figured that the accountancy qualification would be useful and getting to understand accounting and how deals are structured was really valuable training.
FTAdviser: What attracted you to fund management?
Various members of my family had talked about investing and the stock market on occasions. I remember my grandfather telling me about how his father had seen his portfolio absolutely annihilated in the great crash of 1929-30 so I had the seed of interest planted early.
Two things happened in the course of the training contract with Arthur Andersen that really influenced me, though.
Firstly, an opportunity came up through my politics tutor at Oxford, Vernon Bogdanor, to spend six months as an intern in the Policy Unit at 10 Downing Street.
To the enormous credit of the team at Andersen, they let me do it and kept my job open for me although I do remember one partner at the time saying “Why on earth would you want to do that?” when I first told him.
As expected, it was a wonderful opportunity just to see what it is like in that sort of environment.
David Miliband was leading the Policy Unit then and the intellectual horsepower round the table was huge. This was 1998-99 so the Blair administration was fresh and ambitious, but still struggling a bit to find the levers of state to actually make change happen.
All that said, the most powerful lesson from the experience for me was that it made me realise that I could not work in that type of environment.
I left with huge respect for everyone involved but the gap between analysis, decision and action was just too big and the process of building consensus for action was too vague and imprecise for me.
FTA: Bit like financial services, then? But what brought you back to the profession?
On returning to the business world though, the dotcom bubble was just getting going and it’s easy now to forget just how crazy it was: one of my bosses at Andersen was day trading internet stocks around his other work.
