Nicola Horlick

Nicola Karina Christina Horlick, (born Nicola Christina Karina Gayford, December 12 1960, Nottingham) is a prominent female British investment fund manager.

Early life

Her mother was a Polish Jewish refugee who had fled the Nazis, and became a qualified architect, after Nicola and her brother were born. Her father was a Liberal candidate in the 1970s for Wirral. She grew up on the Wirral next to the Royal Liverpool Golf Club, Hoylake.

She attended the independent Kingsmead School (a prep school) in Hoylake from the ages of six to thirteen. She was one of three girls amongst 300 boys. She has said about the boys there, they were always sending me drippy love letters.

She then boarded at the independent Cheltenham Ladies' College in 1973. She stayed for two years then went to Birkenhead High School (a direct-grant grammar school) with Penny Hughes, who became head of Coca-Cola UK at the age of 33. She also spent some time at the Phillips Exeter Academy. She gained nine O levels, four A levels and an S level. She gained a place at Balliol College, Oxford in 1979 to study Law, gaining an LLB. At Balliol she was one of thirty women in a college of five hundred students. She did not want to pursue a career in Law.

Career

She started work for her father in his animal feed business in 1982. She started as a graduate trainee at SG Warburg in 1983 having worked as a journalist. This became part of Mercury Asset Management in 1984. She joined Morgan Grenfell in 1991. Her company, Bramdean Alternatives Limited, is a Guernsey-based investment company whose shares are traded on the main London Stock Exchange. It is named after the Hampshire village where she has a house.

Her career has included working at Mercury Asset Management, which she started in 1997, and Morgan Grenfell Asset Management before setting up SG Asset Management in 1997 and Bramdean Asset Management in 2005.

Connection to Bernard Madoff Scandal

In October 2008, the company had a net asset value of US$ 220,245,659. In November 2008, this had changed to US$ 196,999,889. However, there was a serious flaw in the portfolio. By December 2008, Bramdean Alternatives had invested about 9 per cent of its assets (about £10m) with the discredited US trader Bernard Madoff -- money Horlick admitted she was "uncertain" she would ever see again. As a result, Bramdean shares promptly lost a third of their value. Her former local council, Wirral, lost £2m.

Personal life

She has been described as Superwoman in the media for balancing her high-flying finance career with bringing up five children. She separated in June 2004 and divorced in 2005.

She married Timothy Piers Horlick in June 1984 in Chester, whom she had met at Oxford, when she was 23. She married Brasenose College-educated Martin Baker, a financial journalist, on September 8 2006. They had met in March 2005, when he interviewed her for the Sunday Telegraph.

Publications

• Can You Have It All? ISBN 0330354590, Jul 10 1998, Pan Books (out of print)

External links

• Bramdean
• The Bramdiva
• BBC Profile
• Desert Island Discs July 29 2007
• FSA Register
• Martin Baker page at Pan MacMillan

News items

• Sunday Express November 2008
• Times May 2008
• Daily Mail January 2008
• Money Marketing June 2007
• Getting married in September 2006
• Sunday Times May 2006
• The Observer September 2005
• Ellesmere Port Pioneer July 2003

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