Anthony Bolton

With attractive valuations on global equity markets, London’s best-known stock-picker Anthony Bolton said the top four picks for future gains are consumer cyclicals, technology, value stocks and the financial sector. Speaking in Taipei yesterday, Anthony Bolton, president of investments at Fidelity International, also said he saw potential for an uptrend in equity markets, although he said this upcoming recovery would be a slow one.

Anthony Bolton says "Many investors, in my experience, don’t like to be associated with businesses that are not doing well and can miss when a change for the better occurs. A great sign often comes when analysts give up on a company and there are few people making forecasts on the business."

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Anthony Bolton is about as close as the British investment community gets to a well-known “investment sage”.   Now semi-retired from Fidelity International, Bolton has a long-term record of Buffet-esque quality - so we should sit up and take note when he says stocks are looking cheap.

Anthony Bolton, London’s best-known stockpicker, said yesterday that he had never seen retailing and media shares looking so cheap and that he had begun to put his own money into the equity market at the height of the current financial crisis.

Anthony Bolton, the legendary Fidelity fund manager, has warned that the contagion gripping global credit markets will seep into stock markets like cancer in 2008. Bolton fears that the combination of tightening credit, increasing pressure on consumer expenditure and falling property prices will have a severe impact on the economy.

The credit crisis and its knock-on effects on world stock markets and financial earnings will drag on well into 2008, according to Anthony Bolton, star manager of Fidelity International's special situations fund.

Bolton said: "The impact from the financial crisis will not disappear quickly. The worst will be over next year. The first half of the year will be the critical time." Bolton said he had become cautious earlier this year, before the crisis, because a four-year equities bull run had reduced the number of opportunities for investment.

The leading fund manager Anthony Bolton has been at the top of his trade since 1979, so the current volatile markets haven't fazed him. Mr Bolton had been expecting markets to turn at some point because, after a four-year bull run fuelled by cheap debt, he believed investors were failing to differentiate enough between risky and non-risky assets.

"One thing I have learnt in following the market is that it is cyclical and that it doesn't go up for ever or down for ever. When it has been going up steadily for four years, there will be setbacks.

Anthony Bolton is a contrarian value investor and something of a legend in the industry because he has managed to outperform his peers and benchmarks consistently over the last 25 years.This achievement is all the more remarkable given his responsibility for managing the Fidelity Special Situations fund which stands at over £3bn - conventional wisdom has it that it is much harder to outperform rivals with larger sums of money under management. Bloomberg interviews Anthony Bolton.