19th December 2008

Thames River's Christmas cracker

We here at Thames River would like to take this opportunity to wish you a Happy Christmas after a tough year for this industry.

The team are committed to making sure the obvious benefits of a pure investment focused boutique, established for over 10 years, work in favour of our investors' returns, as they certainly should do. It should reassure you that Thames River has no debt and a strong, balanced business. Although no company is completely immune to this downturn our team joined Thames River because of its quality of management, culture and sound financial base. Being a private company also means long-term business plans can be delivered upon without the pressures of a public listing, aggressive dominant private equity shareholder or an ailing bank parent. This combination is an ideal backdrop for our new business’s formative years.

Thanks to the support of advisors like you, inflows now total over £90m since October 2007 launch, and are accelerating with net sales hitting 25% market share in Q3. November was in fact our best month for net inflows so far, with UK inflows just shy of £6m – a trend continuing into December.

With a bias to fund selection, diversification and a focus on consistency, the Thames River Multi-Manager funds are managed in a way that we believe is suited to most market conditions. Employing this consistent team-based approach over the last 13 years and the resulting consistency of outperformance is what helped us achieve our AA-ratings at launch (OBSR and S&P).

The start for our new business is encouraging to us - we list some of the recent highlights below:

100% outperformance – Performance of all five onshore multi-manager funds is 1st or 2nd quartile (to 16th December 2008) further building on the teams’ consistent long-term track record.

25% market share - Since launching Thames River Multi-Manager in October 2007, there have been inflows every day into our five onshore funds – net sales in Q3 2008 were over 25% of IMA net FOF sales.

Top Group in Professional Adviser Hot 100 - Thames River recently hit the No.1 spot for fund promoters offering less than 15 funds (1st December 2008). The Hot 100 identifies the investment houses achieving the most consistent performance across their range.

We know good service is vital to you and we are delighted to have just won the Most Improved Service Provider in the 2009 Financial Adviser Awards. These awards are based on a survey of 10,500 advisers who were asked to rate groups on the service they had received in the last 12 months – thank you if you voted for us.

The team are also a nominee for Professional Adviser’s Best Multi-Manager Group Award in our first year at Thames River Multi-Capital – voting is now open for The Professional Adviser awards, and if you would like to vote for Thames River Capital as Best Multi-Manager Group, visit Professional Adviser and click on the awards icon - voting closes at the end of the year.

We look forward to staying in touch in the year ahead, and thank you again for your support at this early stage in our business - you can certainly expect to see us in your part of the world again, should you wish to of course!

Best wishes for 2009.