'Once-A-Decade' Buying Opportunity Opens Up

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:00]Nick Train is a big cheese in the world of financial trading. He's a stock picker. He helps people play the markets, but the prospect of AI doing his work for him has seen the value of his companies tumble in recent months.

[00:00:12]Now though he's doubling down and he promises a once-in-a-decade buying opportunity. Ian King joins us, Times business columnist and markets commentator. Morning, Ian.

[00:00:21]>> Hi, Gavin.

[00:00:21]>> If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

[00:00:24]Once-in-a-decade buying opportunity, what's he what's he talking about?

[00:00:27]What's happening here?

[00:00:29]>> Well, Nick is one of the UK's best known stock pickers. He's had a very very successful track record over a very long period of time. He's 67 years old now, so he's got decades of experience in the markets, but over recent times his performance has fallen short of the benchmarks. But what's very interestingly he's announced is that Finsbury Income and Growth Trust, which is the investment trust that he manages, very very large fund held by an awful lot of individual investors. And four of its five biggest holdings were the the share price took a real shellacking earlier in this year. Obviously, most people think that AI is going to be long-term beneficial for economies around the world, but there were specific companies of the kind that Nick Train had invested in, for example, London Stock Exchange Group, which most people think is the business that owns the the stock exchange. It's actually really a data provider. That's its main source of revenues along with running indices like the FTSE 100. That sold off really badly on the assumption that a lot of the data that it owns potentially could be replicated by AI. Another example is Sage, which is one of the UK's biggest tech companies.

[00:01:36]Provides software that helps small businesses with their accounting. Again, it was sold off on the basis a lot of what it does could be disposed of by AI. Relx, another one, huge. These are very very big FTSE 100 companies. Experian, one of the biggest global names in credit checking and providing credit scores for individual consumers. All of these companies took a real pasting earlier this year, and that's what Nick Train is excited about.

[00:02:02]He says, "These These companies have been beaten up very, very badly, and there's value in the share price." And accordingly, he's leveraging up his as you said, Callum, 400 million pounds, and he's going to be investing in stocks like these. The trouble is, by telegraphing it so so publicly, he he may already have inadvertently pushed the share price up in one or two cases.

[00:02:21]>> That's really interesting that, actually. Uh should we go on to BP?

[00:02:24]We've been following this story the last couple of days. Um just remind us what happened uh to Well, that led to the departure of Albert Manifold, and what's been happening since?

[00:02:34]>> Yeah, this is a really embarrassing soap opera that has developed at one of the UK's biggest and most important companies. Uh Tuesday this week, Albert Manifold was was shown the door by BP.

[00:02:45]He's only been chairman since October, and he was brought in essentially, well, for two-fold. First of all, to hire a new chief executive after uh Murray Auchincloss was ousted last year. He did that. He brought in Meg O'Neill, who's an experienced American executive, most recently running Woodside Petroleum in Australia. Um but he was also brought in to show bring a bit more rigor into the way BP's run. Um its share price has really underperformed Shell, which is uh its closest peer over many, many years.

[00:03:12]The feeling is that Shell has been a much, much better business. And uh Albert Manifold, who was a very, very successful chief executive of CRH, which he took from being a sort of Dublin-based building materials company into a world leader, now listed on the London Stock Exchange. So, hugely successful businessman with a great track record, albeit not one in the oil and gas sector. And he's come in, and basically was shown the door on Tuesday because the board felt that he was a little too aggressive um in some of uh his dealings with employees, with other board members, even, and uh certainly, according to the FT today, some shareholders. That's come to light in the last 24 hours that Ben Matthews, who is the company secretary, was the uh main target for some of this and it was he, it seems, who escalated this to Dame Amanda Blanc, the chief executive of Viva. She's the senior independent director on the board and they confronted um Manifold and uh shown him the door. Now, since then we've had 48 hours of mudslinging. Uh Albert Manifold clearly very, very unhappy at some of the things that BP have been saying about him and the way they've characterized that incident said, "Look, all I was trying to do was bring a bit more rigor and a bit more focus into the way BP runs its business." But this story is not going to go away, I think. Hugely embarrassing for BP. Don't forget, they're on their third chief executive in 4 years. Uh they really, really could do with a bit of stability in the boardroom.

[00:04:34]>> Good grief. Sounds like prime minister, Ian.

[00:04:37]>> [laughter] >> Thanks very much. It's good to speak with you this morning. Uh that's Ian King, you too. Ian King, Times business columnist and markets commentator.