When Jeffries International bought The Europe Company, the specialist pan-European institutional broker, in July, one of the principal attractions, it was widely acknowledged, was the managing director Henry Reid.
Reid founded The Europe Company in 1991, and thereafter managed nine years of growth and high profitability. This year he was ranked third in the Reuters individual broker analyst league table for smaller European companies, while the brokerage came eighth for small company sales. As the tables suggest, Reid’s standing in the City is high. “He’s a great broker and a great money maker,” says one admirer. “Although he’s a rich man in his own right (his mother was a Cabot, of the Boston family) he’s tremendously driven. He’s also very bright with a lot of integrity. He’s very unlikely to lose your money.”
Reid was born in London in 1958, the son of the celebrated Second World War escapee Major Pat Reid, the mastermind of three escape attempts from Colditz, two of them successful.
Henry was the youngest of five children from Major Reid’s marriage to Jane Cabot. His father’s book, The Colditz Story, had come out in 1953, and by the time Henry was born, his father was farming in Sussex.
In 1966, he went to boarding school in the Swiss Alps. “The school,” he recalls “was full of Germans escaping the Baader Meinhof and Italians escaping the Red Brigade.” He learnt fluent French and German, as well as downhill and cross-country skiing. (He remains a keen skier, but nowadays spends as much time foxhunting with the Beaufort Hunt.)
He remembers always being interested in finance and at the age of 16 was already punting “tiny amounts” on the stockmarket Reid shocked his parents by going to the London School of Economics, which they viewed as a hotbed of red culture. They needn’t have feared, however, because Reid has always, he maintains, been fairly conservative in his politics. The LSE was in any case beginning to move more towards the right, with the addition of a number of monetarist professors.
After graduating in economics with international relations in 1981, Reid joined SG Warburg. After a year, he joined the asset management team under Consuelo Brooke, one of the doyens of European equities. Reid remembers Brooke as a “wonderful, wonderful” boss.
He also worked on the very successful Erisa American pension funds team under Bob Michaelson, and for a while managed the European Selected Market Trust, which was the best performing European fund for the six months that he ran it in 1986.
However, that same year Reid decided fund management was badly paid, and jumped over to the sell side. He joined Wood Mackenzie, setting up a successful European broking arm.
In 1988 virtually the whole of his team moved to Baring Securities, where Reid worked under Christopher Heath.
Reid left Barings at the end of 1990 to set up The Europe Company. “I thought we could provide our clients with a better service in an entrepreneurial environment,” he recalls. “I also felt that it was a time for me to become operationally independent.”
From the outset much emphasis was put on keeping costs low – renting offce space, for example, on the border of Chelsea and Fulham and keeping basic salaries low. Each year, the firm’s analysts visit 500 small to mid-size companies. Sector-wise, it is more broadly based than many similar brokerages.
“We’ve lived in splendid cultural isolation up to now,” says Reid. “But we’re particularly excited about using Jeffries’ technology. I basically wanted an equally entrepreneurial environment whilst having access to greater capital. This seems a genuinely good fit.”
