continued...

“Stephen would only employ academic, rational people,” he notes. “The quality of analysis was what mattered, not the opinions of analysts. James Capel was a place where the analysts were on a pedestal. But we weren't allowed to speak to them.”

The team's “value-oriented investment concept” was comprehensively
ignored by the rest of the business - but did pretty well for its clients,
and grew fast. But come the end of the decade, the market was in
turmoil and Capel's takeover by HSBC was causing havoc. Quinnen,
distressed by the cost-cutting culture of his new owner, cleared his
desk in March 1990. Lang, too, was experiencing a new sensation:
rebelliousness. “I came late to rebellion and it was an intellectual sort
of rebellion when it came.

”I'd done five years in the City, and I thought there had to be more to life than that. I thought
`It's soulless. I don't like these people. They don't display likeable attributes.'”

So the same year that Quinnen left, Lang quit to go sailing. Not for a summer's stocktaking around the Med, but for four years, voyaging to places far beyond the territory of the sun-over-the-yardarm brigade, to Japan, the Aleutian Islands, Pitcairn.

His City peers were full of good advice. “They said I was mad. You'll never get a job again, and so on, and there was no reason not to believe them.”

The Life of Jeremy Hollywood-style would dwell fondly on the sailing years, especially his relationship with his fellow escapees, ex-Capel partners Tom and Ellen Winser, whose golden handcuffs and fine yacht led them to invite Lang to share in their global adventure. You would see shots of the City boys in a frenzy of money-making intercut with huge vistas of ocean and spray, with the Lang voiceover saying “It was humbling - to feel how small and insignificant we are.”

But just when the movie gets a little cloying, we reach another
emotional spike that leads us into the final part of the movie.
All sea films have to have a storm scene - we could pick
one of those. Or we could focus on the moment Lang was
off the coast of Mexico. The chart said there was plenty
of water - but Lang was certain he could make out a reef.

He shouted for the drinks to be ditched and the boat was
crash-jibed out of trouble. The chart was indeed out.
“Sometimes,” says Lang, “it doesn't matter what the chart
says.” As it was off the coast of Mexico, so it is in the
investment arena, where Lang's willingness to go `off-chart' is
legendary. The intensity of the sailing experience brought
together the philosophies of the City Lang and the Yachting
Lang. “I really saw the importance of risk why you have to
put yourself at risk.”

There was one more lesson to learn. He returned to London jobless, broke and homeless - thinking that the “selfish bastards” who were a big reason for his leaving the City would hardly bend over backwards to help. Some didn't; others, including strangers, acted in a way that purged his last streak of nihilism. The Winsers let him live in their London flat while he jobhunted. They also put some money in his account and bought him a suit. “Amazing people,” he says simply
.
By this time, Lang had rediscovered his appetite for managing money - but he was clear that risk would be at the heart of his new career: and that he'd share that risk with his investors. When Nigel Legge and William Carey, two former fund salesmen from his Capel days, set up Liontrust in 1995, Lang proposed a deal. “I said I'd work for peanuts. But I wanted autonomy and a 20 per cent cut of the revenues.”