Schroders will keep wealth manager Cazenove

In today’s newsletter

• Schroders chief vows to keep wealth manager Cazenove

• Hedge fund Saba offers to buy Blue Owl funds at discount

• Investors pour record sums into European stocks

Schroders chief vows to keep wealth manager Cazenove

Schroders will retain its wealth management business Cazenove as part of the £9.9bn takeover by US fund manager Nuveen, the chief executive of Schroders has pledged. He also confirmed he will not receive equity in the enlarged group.

Richard Oldfield told the FT there was “absolutely no reason to think” Cazenove would be sold, though the company was not mentioned in the deal announcement.

“The wealth channel for us is really important,” he said, adding: “We want to grow it.”

“The commitments that Nuveen has made are about our entire business . . . when they talked about keeping people, keeping the business, keeping the brand, that applies to the whole business.”

When Schroders announced the takeover, it noted that there had been a series of approaches from the US asset manager behind the scenes. The Schroders board agreed to a 612p-a-share offer from Nuveen, which is part of the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America.

The Schroder family owns 42 per cent of the London-listed group, which spans asset management, private markets and wealth management. Schroders bought Cazenove in 2013 for £424mn.

Oldfield said the wealth management business was “growing really strongly” and noted that it has a lot of charities as customers. Schroders Wealth Management, the brand used for its overseas operations, has offices in Singapore, Switzerland and the US.

He added that Nuveen also has a “very big wealth business” in the US, working with thousands of investment advisers.

The combined group will have nearly $2.5tn of assets under management in total.

A statement on the day of the deal said there was no intention “to make any material reductions in the employee base of Schroders” for two years after the transaction completes.

Not all shareholders are supportive of the deal. James Lowen and Clive Beagles of UK Equity Income Fund at J O Hambro Capital Management said the “valuation it was transacted at was [about] 10-15 per cent below where would have seen fair value”.

Oldfield said in response that “every shareholder will have a different perspective on whether or not they got good value.

Saba offers to buy Blue Owl funds at discount

Boaz Weinstein’s hedge fund Saba Capital said late last week that it would offer to buy shares of three Blue Owl funds at steep discounts at a time when the $307bn private credit group is seeking to shore up confidence in a crucial retail debt vehicle.

The move would allow investors in the funds to cash out, although they would realise significant losses in the process. The offer from Saba comes at a turbulent period for Blue Owl and the wider $2tn private credit industry.

Blue Owl has faced a bout of withdrawals from a handful of its funds. Investors and analysts are also raising questions about the futures of the software companies large private credit groups have been lending to as advances in AI threaten their business models.

Earlier last week, the New York investment group stated that investors in Blue Owl Capital Corp II would no longer be able to redeem their investments in quarterly intervals. Instead, the company would return investors’ capital in episodic payments as it sells down assets in coming quarters and years.

Shares in Blue Owl and other alternative investment groups, including Blackstone and Ares, fell during the week. Blue Owl’s shares were down 28 per cent this year.

The decision underlines the risks facing retail investors, who have ploughed hundreds of billions of dollars into funds with limited liquidity rights. Weinstein said the tender offer would “help retail investors navigate this challenging period”, adding in a post on X that more details would be available soon.

Cox Capital Management, a financial firm that specialises in high-net-worth investors, has teamed up with Saba for the tender offer.

Tender offers like the one Saba proposed on Friday have occasionally been proposed during previous times of stress for credit markets, and they are often viewed as predatory, given the large concessions they seek. The tenders can also undermine investor confidence in the stated net asset value of a fund, say industry participants.

Chart of the week

Global investors have injected record sums into European equities, as their interest to reduce US equity exposure combines with growing optimism over the state of the region’s economy.

European stocks should receive their highest-ever monthly inflows in February, after two consecutive record weekly flows of about $10bn, according to data from EPFR, which tracks ETF and mutual fund flows.

The continent’s blue-chip Stoxx Europe 600 index has punched through a series of record highs this month, as have indices in the UK, France and Spain. European bourses have benefited from big investors’ desire to diversify away from Wall Street and its massive technology sector, which has been buffeted this year by concerns over a potential AI bubble.

“It’s a lot of global investors wanting to diversify away from an expensive US market,” said Sharon Bell, senior equities strategist at Goldman Sachs, adding this was particularly the case for US-based investors looking overseas. “Europe as an equity market offers a different exposure . . . there’s less tech.”

A rotation in stock market leadership away from the AI giants has boosted European markets with their heavy weighting to “old economy” sectors such as banks and natural resources. The booming demand for physical assets has propelled the UK’s FTSE 100 over 7 per cent higher this year, with stocks such as Weir Group and Antofagasta up more than 20 per cent.

Much of the cash has flowed to funds exposed to non-US markets, rather than funds tracking Europe specifically, amid fears that global portfolios have become overly dominated by expensive AI-linked stocks.

That diversification has powered a host of other global markets ahead of Wall Street this year. The S&P 500 index sits 76th out of 92 major benchmarks tracked by Bloomberg this year.

“Diversifying your currency, diversifying your sector and diversifying your country has become the hottest topic,” Bell said. “People are effectively scanning the world and saying — which are the cheapest pockets? Where are the opportunities?”

Brevan Howard’s crypto fund plummeted 30 per cent in 2025, as a downturn in digital assets stung one of the hedge fund industry’s highest-profile participants in the sector.

Partners Group wants its clients to keep calm about private capital’s recent woes. That’s why it wrote to them to tell them that everything is fine, really.

The world’s biggest private equity houses have struggled to exit their China deals for the second year in a row.

Meanwhile, exchange traded fund providers are starting to push at the limits on holdings of hard-to-trade assets as they try to give retail investors access to hot private stocks and debt.

US universities have had to lean on their endowments as costs rise and funding cuts bite. Federal funding cuts and rising operating costs have squeezed campus budgets.

And finally

Georges Seurat (1859-1891) died young, bequeathing his legacy of an instantly recognisable painting style, pointillism. He employed his technique to create shapes and light by juxtaposing small dots of pure colour not only for his best known Parisian scenes but also seascapes. The Courtauld’s focused display of these is the first devoted to Seurat in the UK in almost 30 years. As he has a very small pool of works, exhibitions devoted to him are rare.

Until May 17 2026