Bank of Ireland stock picker Leona Nicholson stepping down

Leona Nicholson, the head of direct investment management at Bank of Ireland Investment Markets, has decided to leave the group after more than three decades.

The well-regarded stock picker is currently responsible for the bank’s €350 million Global Fundamentals equities fund, which is focused on investing in blue-chip international companies with low debt levels and that pay regular dividends. The fund has delivered returns of 200 per cent for seed investors since it was established a decade ago, according to the bank.

Ms Nicholson will be succeeded at the lead manager of the fund by Deirdre Kennedy, who has been involved in the management of the portfolio since its launch and who has been selecting stocks at the bank since 1998. The transition was announced internally in recent days.

Ms Nicholson joined Bank of Ireland in 1989 and came to prominence in 2004 when she became deputy chief investment manager of its then Bank of Ireland Asset Management (BIAM) unit after four senior investment managers quit to work for Australia’s Perpetual Trustees.

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In 2007, Ms Nicholson became BIAM’s head of global equity product and Irish equities, a position she held until the asset manager was sold to State Street three years later.

The executive went on to set up the Global Fundamentals Fund a year later under the umbrella of Bank of Ireland Private Banking, before the fund moved to the group’s investment markets division in recent years. It is understood that Ms Nicholson has no immediate plans for when she leaves the bank later this year.

Briefing

Market sources say that Ms Nicholson and Ms Kennedy have been briefing investors in the fund in recent days on the leadership handover.

The fund has been in existence for much of the equities bull market that ran between 2009 and early last year. A slump by stocks globally in early 2020, as Covid-19 stuck, proved short-lived as central banks pumped trillions of euro into financial markets.

Global equity shares, as measured by the MSCI All Country World Index, scaled to a new record high on Tuesday, driven by by rising stocks on Wall Street amid a string of strong quarterly earnings reports from companies as investors await details on an expected US Federal Reserve’s decision this week to taper its massive stimulus programme.