Magellan’s Hamish Douglass preaches to the capitalists

Magellan’s Hamish Douglass channelled everyone from Warren Buffett to Steve Jobs as he strode the stage last night.

Hamish Douglass. (Hollie Adams/The Australian)

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of Hamish Douglass the Magellan Financial Group fund manager who performed before some 2,000 people in Melbourne last night as he spruiked before some adoring financial planners on the future of technology.

Artificial intelligence, driverless cars, robots and a very different future are the themes from a manager whose stocks just happen to include Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Hospital Corp.

Closer to home, his infrastructure group has money in Transurban, Sydney Airport and Woolworths.

Douglass is not afraid of likening himself to the great Warren Buffett, noting Buffett followed him into Apple and describing the event last night as a “Woodstock for capitalists”.

That’s what the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting is called but who cares about such references when you are Douglass in full flight and change from your suit into Steve Jobs-type clothes with jeans and a black skivvy.

As one broker noted in his comments to clients: “Is this guy Elvis, Johnny O’Keefe or a very good version of Warren Buffett?”

The message was the key for a $4 billion company which is very much built around the continued performance of one man, Hamish Douglass.

Recent performance is not great, which, he explained last night, was due to a focus on capital preservation.

Over one year he is 6.6 per cent under the benchmark but since inception in July 2007 he has returned 10.6 per cent a year or 6.1 per cent ahead of the benchmark. Elsewhere he has blamed holdings in Lloyds and CVS for the underperformance.

Marketing is the name of the game and Douglass was able to convince the invited to spend $500 per table with the funds going to charity.

Last year he floated the concept of creating a think tank in Magellan’s name but that idea seems to have been forgotten or at least not progressed.

The target is self-managed super funds, rich mum and dad investors who may have been impressed by him quoting futurists like Ray Kurzweil and videos of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos amid his own musings on the changes ahead as he strode the stage dodging a wayward seagull which managed to finds its way into the function.

Douglas has done extraordinarily well in his 10 years in the game but obviously the key risk is that Magellan is very much about Hamish Douglass.

So what happens if he falls under a bus?

Still, that was a long way from his mind as he produced his show, after musing that when he first started the audience was just a handful of friends.

Back in the 1980s, Douglass along with former UBS boss Chris Mackay and incumbent chief Matthew Grounds moved to Potter Warburg, after that Douglass moved (with Flagstaff’s Tony Burgess) across to EL & C Baillieu and then to Deutsche bank where he was a leading merger and acquisition practitioner before becoming a fund’s management guru.