The rugby lads won the World Cup and from then things haven't gone quite as they would have wanted since then,

Dale was already in the mix and Michael Robertson was coming through. At the 2003 world championships we had three people in the top 12 so we were already on the rise. We believed it could be a high performance program at the Olympics.

We are likely to upgrade our 2006 numbers slightly as a result, and do not believe that the shares look expensive relative to the peer group, once allowance is made for the cash on the balance sheet.

Better performance fees than we were expecting have driven the earnings number sharply higher.

Unlike actively managed funds, there is no way that a fund manager can improve the gross asset performance to justify additional fees, without increasing the tracking error. Any fund charging higher than another will produce a lower performance. The range of charges is substantial.

Just as the institutional long-only market has become more focused on value added, retail funds are likely to follow gradually in the years to come.