Farewell to the Harry Potter of stock-picking

Twenty-seven years ago, a shy 29-year-old engineering graduate from Cambridge University left his job as a trainee fund manager at an obscure South African investment company in London. In a move that some of his colleagues regarded as foolhardy, he had accepted an offer to join a little-known private American firm that had never sold an investment fund over here before, but thought that Britain under Margaret Thatcher — who had been elected just a few months earlier — might be a good place to try to break into the European investment market.