Meet the Manager - Q&A with Tom Atkinson

2. What is interesting about your role here at AXA IM and what motivates you to do well?

My role is interesting, and demanding, because it is unpredictable. The stocks in our portfolios fluctuate depending on company specific as well as macroeconomic factors, and it is crucial that we stay up to date with these so that we can continue to appraise their outlooks. You must be hungry to continually learn and question previously held assumptions as a portfolio manager; for me this makes the role intellectually stimulating and dynamic.

I am motivated because I think the energy transition and biodiversity (our two main strategy focuses) are generational investment opportunities and I want to ensure our clients benefit from them as much as possible. At the same time, our funds explicitly aim to have a positive impact, so I hope that our capital allocation decisions can contribute to societal progress. In particular our Biodiversity fund is relatively new and I am motivated to grow this as the biodiversity theme becomes more mainstream, like energy transition already has. I find the current political flip-flopping on environmental policies frustrating, both domestically and abroad, and feel like the private sector is relatively unconstrained and making good progress as a result.  

3. How do you feel you complement the team’s skills and add value?

We are a small team of four portfolio managers, structured to play to our strengths. Mine is company analysis, partly given my prior role as a research analyst. In my opinion, there is no substitute for doing your own work and building your own views on stocks. We have our own areas of research coverage within the team; mine include utilities, renewables developers, water and solar. These are areas I used to cover at Newton and thus have in-depth knowledge which I can use to our advantage.

I have also relished taking on marketing responsibilities in the role and developing new skills. I’ve presented at conferences, sat on panels and completed roadshows and events across Europe, spreading the word on all things biodiversity and energy transition. I have learned this is a very important part of the role and the industry; clients need to understand the opportunity as clearly as we do, and it is incumbent upon us to achieve this. Sometimes there is a perception that investment in biodiversity or energy transition necessitates a return trade off; in fact we think long term returns should be stronger by having exposure to these themes.

4. Since joining the Equity team, what has surprised you the most?

I have been pleasantly surprised by the amount of group-level support for the strategies I work on. Of course, AXA IM’s parent is an insurer and it is only sensible that they should support investment strategies contributing to a world that remains insurable. This manifests itself in seeding for new environmental strategies, strong resourcing and willingness to participate in initiatives to further the environmental agenda. For example, AXA is invested in a private biodiversity-focused data provider called Iceberg Data Labs. Access to Iceberg data gives me an additional lens to think about investments through their biodiversity footprint score. Moreover, AXA IM recently hired a new Head of Equity, Jeroen Bos, whose background is in sustainable investment.

I have also been surprised by the trust and autonomy I have been afforded. AXA IM’s culture is not one of micro-management, which encourages accountability and innovation. Of course, there is support and structure too, but this is not restrictive. I think this is reflected by AXA IM being one of the first managers to launch a listed biodiversity strategy (in April 2022); this has given us the launchpad to grow AUM and demonstrate leadership on the theme amongst industry participants.

5. What does progress mean to you?

To me, progress is continuing to learn, from bad investment decisions to new knowledge. There are moments in my role when I realise that I have indeed developed in the nine years I’ve been working in the industry, but there are also very humbling moments when you feel like you have made less progress. This is the beauty of investing! A mentor at my previous company once told me you’re never as bad as you think you are when things are going badly, and you’re never as good as you think you are when things are going well. I try to remember this.

Progress also means thinking long-term. True progress is rarely achieved with quick, sugar-high wins. To me, progress is the aggregation of good habits, good attitude, humility and process. There are a lot of factors beyond your control when investing in public equities and you should be careful to avoid “resulting”: where you conflate bad outcomes or decisions with bad process. Sometimes as investors you will do all the right things and just get unlucky, and that is ok, if frustrating. Thus, as a team we take process very seriously and consider it the foundation to make the best investment decisions for our clients. This helps us play to our strengths, like analysing the fundamentals of a company (i.e. does it have a defendable competitive advantage?), and not be unduly influenced by un-related factors like a previous investment that did not work out. 

6. And aside from work, tell us something interesting about yourself that most people won’t know?

I am passionate about sport and the outdoors. One of my favourite sports is cycling and this summer I completed the Haute Route Alps event – a 7-day race from Megeve to Nice in France. We cycled over 700km and climbed over 20,000m in total, all during an August heatwave with temperatures exceeding 30C every day. I raised £2,500 for MND Association in the process. It was the most demanding physical challenge I have ever done and was inspiring to complete it in such beautiful surroundings. While the heat was a relative inconvenience, it did hit home that heatwaves are seemingly more frequent, partly due to anthropogenic climate change, and this was brutally apparent when juxtaposed by the glacial mountains in which we cycled.