City Cinderella

City Cinderella by Darling, Peter Stormonth. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780297643906.

This is the Cinderella story of Mercury Asset Management, the despised and unwanted offspring - of the merchant bank S.G. Warburg - which went on to outperform them all. When the author was appointed chairman of Warburg Investment Management in 1979 he was told by his boss, Sir Siegmund Warburg, that his first task was to get rid of it. It was an embarrassing appendage and would never amount to anything. Fortunately no one wanted it. By the early 1980s it began to grow rapidly and, renamed Mercury Asset Management, it gathered astonishing momentum in the rest of that decade. By the mid 1990s it had over 100 billion [pounds] in funds and was the largest UK fund manager, responsible for 5 per cent of all investment in UK equities. This is a book about changing times in the City of London, about risk and innovation, and a great British success story. It covers the period in which investment management emerged from the shadows of merchant banking as a valuable business in its own right. But above all, it is a book about people.