In that it is in tune with the movement for which it will become a core text

In that, it is in tune with the movement for which it will become a core text.. Robin Batchelor runs the Merrill Lynch New Energy Technology investment trust, which broke new ground last year as the first UK investment fund to concentrate solely on companies developing alternative and renewable sources of energy It is a role for which he is ideally suited. Robin Batchelor runs the Merrill Lynch New Energy Technology investment trust, which broke new ground last year as the first UK investment fund to concentrate solely on companies developing alternative and renewable sources of energy. It is a role for which he is ideally suited.
“I have a slightly unusual background for a fund manager because I have a BSc in applied geology and an MSc in investment analysis,” he says. “I decided during my last year at university that if I was going to use my first degree I could go out to an oil rig or be a geologist, neither of which appealed much.

I also knew people in the City and that seemed a much more attractive career path, so I opted to boost that side of my knowledge by doing the MSc.”I did my internship with the mining team at what was then Mercury [Mercury Asset management was taken over by Merrill Lynch in 1998], then I started as a full-time analyst, initially working on gold sector funds and then on mining sector funds.”But Mr Batchelor was becoming convinced of the growing importance of the energy sector. “I kept saying to my boss, ‘Why aren’t we running an energy fund?’ and it turned out that we’d had an Energy International Fund since 1969. It was lurking on the institutional side of the business and remained very small.”I’m from south of Aberdeen and I’ve grown up with the oil industry. This helped to prove I knew what energy was, so they said, OK, you can run the energy fund. After nine months, I started making investments in these new energy areas, but since it is a general fund I couldn’t take the weighting in these companies too high. My remit was to offer exposure to the whole energy sector, which was why we got into new energy in the first place.”So Mr Batchelor argued for Merrill Lynch to set up a fund which concentrated solely on these newly developing areas. The result was Merrill Lynch New Energy Technology, launched last October.

“We really wanted to capture the potential of the unquoted stocks in the sector, and even six or nine months ago the market was less liquid, with fewer stocks available. We felt the best way to give exposure to a nascent sector was through a closed-end fund.”He lists his “Five Drivers” that will fuel the growth of the alternative energy sector: environmental pressure, deregulation, technological advances, energy reliability and quality and the impact of e-commerce “These are the kind of things that are not going to go away. It is a matter of consumer pull not producer push that drives the growth of these technologies, and you need the technologies to solve the problems posed by consumer demand.”We raised £200m and we wanted to put the money into the market in a sensible manner We didn’t want to be driven by liquidity constraints. We have a global remit, but most of the fund’s investments are in the US and Canada [70 per cent], since North America has numerically the largest group of companies in the field.”Mr Batchelor remains bullish on the long-term prospects for this sector, despite a negative early performance record. Many new energy companies suffered in the move away from technology stocks “The demand for energy is widespread and it is fundamental. Company valuations have been hit by the technology fallout, because the market doesn’t tolerate uncertainty but those companies at, or close to, a point where they can commercially exploit their technologies are being rewarded.”We have 39 holdings in the fund, but the top 10 account for 50 per cent of the portfolio.