Samuel Terry - Now That's a Good Boutique Name
12/12/2006

With approximately 47 boutiques opening up every week, fund managers are having to try a lot harder to come up with a decent, original name.

Or at least dig a lot deeper into the history books.

A favourite name we’ve come across recently is Samuel Terry Asset Management, an interesting little shop set up by Fred Woollard, a deep value contrarian who buys cheap assets wherever he finds them – he’s got a 9 per cent weighting to Indonesian shares, for example.

So who is Samuel Terry? Naturally, we go on to Google, just as we had recently when Edward Baillie Capital came to our attention.

(that search produced no likely eponyms – turns out ‘Edward’ and ‘Baillie’ are the middle names of founders John Steinthal and John Carter. John Deakin-Bell, the long/short manager who arrived a little later, tells people his middle name is ‘Capital’.)

But Samuel Terry was a real-life legend.  Australia’s first home grown millionaire, and as a proportion of GDP still the richest-ever Australian, Terry arrived here in 1800 as a penniless convict.

“He did his seven years, and was then granted the 50 acres of land which everyone got in those days,” as Woollard tells it.  “He bought a pub in Parramatta, and hit upon the idea of giving free beer to customers, in return for them mortgaging their own land grants to him.”

The Australian attachment to grog was much stronger then the attachment to property back then – Terry became enormously wealthy off his land ‘speculation’ ( a deep value strategy indeed), co-founded what is now Westpac, and was a household name in Britain as the “Botany Bay Rothschild’.

Not a bad bloke to associate a small business with, you’d agree.


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