Star fund manager Gervais Williams launches book on small cap investing

Star fund manager Gervais Williams, managing director of Miton Group, has published his second book on investing, entitled: ?The Future Is Small?.

Gervais Williams said of the book: ?The Future is Small contends that we are at the early stages of a multi-decade period of small companies? outperformance ? a new super-cycle of returns from the smallest quoted stocks. The inconvenient truth is that without decent world growth, there are now few mainstream market indices that have attractive prospects.?

Fundamentally, the award-winning equity fund manager believes that it is the greater growth potential of genuinely small companies that explains why many can buck a tough economic trend, whereas most larger companies, with major market positions, are trapped by their flat sales.

According to research by E. Dimson and P. Marsh, £1 invested in 1955 in the ?small value? part of the Numis Smaller Companies Index (NSCI), would have grown to £61,233 by 2013.

Williams added: ?If portfolio allocations are a measure of the maturity of a trend, then independently-minded market participants can take great comfort from the fact that very few portfolios have anything like a full weighting in genuinely small companies. Indeed, very few UK ?Smaller Companies? funds have a decent weighting of genuinely small companies. Portfolio weightings in stocks listed on the AIM market are probably even more under-represented.?