Sushil Wadhwani to step back from eponymous firm

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Sushil Wadhwani, a prominent economist and former Bank of England policymaker, is stepping down as chief investment officer of the asset manager he founded.

In a letter to clients seen by the Financial Times, 63-year-old Wadhwani said that with “mixed emotions” he had decided to “pass on the baton” to colleagues, 21 years after the firm’s original launch as Wadhwani Asset Management. The firm is now owned by $1.3tn US fund group PGIM

He will remain in place until the end of this year before Michael Dicks, now the fund’s chief economist, takes over as chief investment officer. Wadhwani, who is also a member of the UK chancellor’s economic advisory council, wrote that he will then become a senior adviser to the firm until June 2024. 

Wadhwani, who has previously worked at Goldman Sachs and hedge funds Tudor and Caxton, served on the BoE’s Monetary Policy Committee between 1999 and 2002. 

He went on to set up the eponymous firm, a quantitative global macro specialist, and in 2018 sold it to PGIM, the global investment management business of US insurer Prudential Financial. 

PGIM said: “This departure is a natural progression of the PGIM Wadhwani succession plan . . . Under this change of leadership, PGIM Wadhwani’s investment process will remain unchanged.” 

Wadhwani named some of the firm’s funds after economist John Maynard Keynes. While studying for his PhD at the London School of Economics in the early 1980s Wadhwani became fascinated with Keynes’s investment career and insights, many of which were starkly different to the efficient market orthodoxy he had been taught. 

The $860mn PGIM Wadhwani Trend Plus strategy, the firm’s largest fund, is down 8 per cent this year to June 30 after gaining 31.8 per cent in 2022 and 11.5 per cent in 2021, according to a fund fact sheet. It has delivered net annualised returns of 7 per cent since its January 2005 launch.