Wealth Manager Profile: Martin O'Hare

SG Hambros Private Banking’s group head of discretionary portfolio management is just back from visiting a client in Birmingham.

Trips to see private clients often conjure up images of managers jetting off to far-flung and exotic locations, and O’Hare smiles ruefully as he concedes: ‘I know it’s hardly Monaco, that would certainly sound better.’

Such frippery belies the serious business nous behind a manager who personally oversees £270 million of assets for around 100 private clients and who is behind the group’s new Market Opportunities Strategy, designed to help position private client portfolios for a market recovery.

In truth, the affable Scot does have some clients in far flung places, although most are in the UK, Channel Islands or the Isle of Man.

He certainly has managed funds investing in more exotic locations across Europe and Latin America during a career which saw him start out as many of his fellow Scottish investment peers do, at the venerable Edinburgh institution that was Ivory & Sime.

Brought up in the north west Glasgow suburb of Bearsden where he still has family, O’Hare initially stayed close to home, studying for an MA in economics at Glasgow University before gaining a masters in business information technology from Strathclyde Business School.

He recalls how he accepted a job in London with pensions consultancy firm Mercer before having a change of heart. ‘I changed my mind at the last minute because the job was more on the investment consultancy side. Ivory & Sime had also offered me a job and I felt it was better to run the money first rather than become an investment consultant.’

He joined Ivory & Sime’s small graduate intake on the same day as Artemis’s Derek Stuart and remembers well his early days when they both had to learn the ropes of the investment business within Edinburgh’s small yet prestigious investment community.

He smiles as he recalls the salubrious surroundings of Edinburgh’s West End. ‘They had the most prestigious office address in Edinburgh: 1 Charlotte Square.’

O’Hare cut his teeth in the group’s equities department, working on Japanese and European equities before being asked to become involved in the formation of a Latin American equities team.