By:
mryash
on 1:17 AM
By Brian Milligan
Personal Finance reporter
Since he launched his own fund exactly a year ago, Neil Woodford has delighted investors with an 18% return on their cash.
By contrast, the average share on the London stock exchange - up to the end of last week - had risen by just 2%.
Mr Woodford, who judges success over decades rather than years, is doing everything he can to dampen down the euphoria.
"It's far too early to conclude that the fund's strategy has worked," he says.
On the personal qualities needed in a good fund manager, he is equally understated.
"I would suggest that a healthy balance between arrogance and humility is helpful," he says.
Colleagues are less equivocal.
"He's arguably the best fund manager of his generation," says Mark Dampier, research director at Hargreaves Lansdown.
His view is based on Mr Woodford's long-term record - 25 years of market-beating returns.
To many, he looks like the man who just can't stop making money.
'High single digits'
Neil Woodford is not the best fund manager in the country over the last year. In fact, he currently comes in at number 235 out of more than 1500 in a league table produced by Financial Express (FE).But his performance is the best in the Equity Income sector - a part of the industry that aims to provide investors with a regular income.
However, to get a true measure of the man, Woodford fans say you need to take into account his record at his previous employer, Invesco Perpetual. Anyone investing a pension fund of £10,000 with him 27 years ago - and then following him to his new fund - would now have £309,000. (Figures to end of May 2015).
Had they invested the money across the stock market as a whole, they would only have £117,000.
The danger of doing so well is that investors have high expectations - expectations which Woodford is trying to rein in.
He says his aim is to deliver "high single-digit" returns every year, averaged out over three to five years.
"We hope to deliver more than this, but this is the target against which we expect to be judged," he says.
