Fidelity is a private company so it’s hard to know how much he’s paid yet his non

Fidelity is a private company, so it’s hard to know how much he’s paid, yet his non appearance in “City rich” lists is almost certainly an oversight. A value-driven investor was always going to miss the madness of the technology bubble, for there was ultimately no value in it.Mr Bolton has made huge quantities of money both for his followers and in his own right. It is sometimes said that successful investment is more art than science, and Mr Bolton certainly seems to have an almost uniquely good nose for it. He can sniff the undervalued company a mile off.He hasn’t always got it right He underperformed in the recession of the early 1990s. There was another period of relative underperformance in the late 1990s, when he failed to ride the growth stock phenomenon quite as vigorously as his some of his peers. Mr Bolton is not really the “quiet assassin” of media legend, a sobriquet he acquired by blackballing Michael Green as chairman of ITV.In fact he very rarely gets directly involved in shareholder activism of that sort, one other notable exception being the role he played in encouraging small shareholders to form an action group to sue the Government over the effective renationalisation of Railtrack.

In practice, he tends to leave the assasination to others.His rather is a contrarian approach to investment, diligently researched and perfectly executed. Can the success of the funds outlast the man?It will be interesting to see, but I wouldn’t put money on it. Investors in the Fidelity Special Situations Fund are investing in Mr Bolton, and his seeming powers of clairvoyancy. To sugar the pill, Mr Bolton will continue to run both funds until the end of next year, and one of them for a further year after that, before moving off into the ether to provide mentoring for Fidelity’s various research teams. That particular investment rotation may now have run its course, so it makes eminent sense to split the fund into more manageable chunks.Only one problem. Fortunately for him, this has coincided with a period when big caps were out of favour, and therefore provided better value for money than they have in the past.

As the fund has grown, he’s moved progressively into larger, FTSE 100 companies. Mr Bolton is perhaps acting pre-emptively before the same thing happens to him.Mr Bolton made his reputation and fortune from investing in small and mid-caps. The bigger it gets, the more difficult sustaining such a high level of investment churn becomes.We’ve been here before. Even the mighty George Soros was forced eventually to split his Quantum fund up to answer charges of poor performance, and today, few hedge fund managers will take on any more than $500m because of the difficulty of investing it profitably. There are just not enough special situations or obviously undervalued companies out there for the billions to pour into, or to be more precise, not enough for a single investment team to be able to get their heads around. Unusually for a fund manager as successful as he, Mr Bolton tends to turn his entire fund over every 18 months.

As all investors know, the bigger an investment pot becomes, the harder it gets to invest the money successfully. There were also measures to deter new investors.With £5.4bn of funds under management, the special situations fund is already far and away the largest UK equity fund of its type. Over the last few years in particular, a period in which many fund managers have struggled to win any new funds at all, there has been a monumental inflow of capital.Put simply, Mr Bolton has become a victim of his own success. Yet even Mr Bolton seemed to admit that his success was unsustainable yesterday when Fidelity announced proposals to split the fund in two. Just occasionally, however, a fund manager will make it into orbit. And for a very, very rare few – Anthony Bolton of Fidelity’s Special Situations Fund being a case in point – there is the chance to escape gravity altogether.An investment of £1,000 in his special situations fund when it was founded in December 1979 would today be worth £100,000. Not even property prices in north London has done as well as that.