Our history

The current Sceptre Investment Management Ltd. was incorporated in May 2020. The original firm was founded in March 2005 by Chris Broadhurst and managed the Sceptre UK Fund until 2009. The fund, now closed, invested in a concentrated portfolio of undervalued equities.

The fund was managed by Chris Broadhurst (1959-2009) and Luke Howard Taylor, who is now Managing Director of Sceptre Investment Management. Lipper, Inc. performance analysis showed that over the life of the fund it ranked 4th of 1,260 peers. In its last 12 months of operation it was the best-performing UK equity fund in Lipper's universe of 1,907 funds. The fund was liquidated following Chris's death in August 2009.

The fund was managed by a separate company, Sceptre Investment Management Ltd (subsequently renamed Ertpecs Limited, company number 05399692), which was dissolved on 29 December 2020. Its record is not the record of the current company, Sceptre Investment Management Ltd (company number 12607022), or of any strategy the current company advises on. The former fund followed a different investment approach and operated in a different period. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results.

Luke Howard Taylor

After early interests in cryptography and quantum mechanics, Luke joined the original Sceptre company in 2005. He was studying Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London when Chris read a paper he had written on pricing derivatives using stochastic volatility. He worked as that company's sole employee and became a shareholder in 2006. After Chris's death in 2009 he liquidated the Sceptre UK Fund and joined Longview Partners in early 2010, where he was part of a team of six that managed an average of approximately $20bn. He went on sabbatical at the end of 2020 and retired as a partner in 2021. In 2020 he began focusing on automating the management of global large-cap securities, which he believed was increasingly a data science problem rather than an analytical described in Ben Graham's Security Analysis.