London-based River & Mercantile (R&M), a privately owned UK investment manager, has been award-ed a £20m($32.6m) specialist UK equities mandate by Short Brothers, part of Northern Ireland's Bombardier Aerospace group, confirming increasing interest in its specialist approach.

The account is to be managed by R & M's investment director Jeremy Lang, who since 1996 has identified UK companies that are most likely to surprise the market with their earnings results.It is a process through which R & M's First Growth Fund has, according to Lang: consistently outperformed the market by 10% over a number of years."

"Firstly, I identify stocks which are already bucking market expectations, then try to work out why this has happened," Lang explains. "Next, I latch on to those stocks where the market has actually read the situation incorrectly. What interests me are recurrent misjudgements in analyst psychology, that is the way they react to certain situations, which can often give misleading results," he adds."