Buffettology disciple prays for Brexit and buys dips

"I love crashes, brokers cannot believe me when there's red all over the screen and I'm in a really good mood saying this is fantastic, we just need another 10 per cent down now and I'll be really happy," he says, clapping his hands in glee.

"I absolutely love it because I know we will get some wonderful price opportunities that did not exist a week ago."

The manager, who celebrated the fund's fifth birthday on 28 March, feels the same way about a possible UK exit from the European Union (EU) - 'Brexit'. Rearing up in his seat with a laugh he says: "I pray to God we vote to leave the EU because that will really spook the market in the short term. I love anything which spooks the market so I will be waiting there. If sterling gets hammered by Brexit that will be a wonderful thing for all the exporters in the fund, too."

Mr Ashworth-Lord set up his fund in 2011 to replicate Warren Buffett's investing style, ignoring top-down patterns and business cycles in favour of what he terms a "business analysis" style of investing. "This is a complete bottom-up fund with no top-down allocation," he says. "All I am trying to do is find the very best businesses I can afford according to a pre-determined set of criteria, and buy in at a price that makes sense. I would sit with them forever and a day if possible. I would be very happy with that."

To be included in Mr Ashworth-Lord's select list (he aims to hold between 27 and 35 holdings) companies must meet a range of criteria including predictable earnings, robust balance sheets and pricing power. But free cash flow is his favoured metric by far. "To me, the only thing that matters is how much cash a business generates from now until judgment day," he says.

The fund holds just under 12 per cent of its assets in cash but that is not due to nervousness. In fact, Mr Ashworth-Lord has been on a spending spree following a year where markets were peaking and value opportunities were thin on the ground. "We went into the current year with about 18 per cent in cash and over the course of the last three months I've put £6.6m back into the market," he explains.

Unlike when he set up the fund, he says the value opportunities now are in the large caps indiscriminately punished by market routs, as opposed to the smaller and less researched companies further down the market capitalisation spectrum. He holds a greater amount in mid and large caps than previously; 24 per cent of the fund is invested in large-caps, with 4.4 per cent in mega-caps, and it also holds nine Aim companies.

"If you had asked me (where the value was) when I started out and had a preponderance of smaller companies in the fund, I'd have said that it was in smaller companies because these aren't so well researched," he says. "But I think what's happened in the last two years is every time there's a big market correction I've gone in with a lot of cash, and the bigger stocks have been hit hard and offered me the best opportunities to put money back into the market. Larger caps get indiscriminately hammered in market falls and give me the opportunity to buy on the cheap."

Investing in dips has meant two new (and large) investments into Hargreaves Lansdown (HL), hit hard in the August, October and December crashes of 2014, and Bioventix (BVXP), added to the fund for the first time in December 2014 and now the largest holding. Mr Ashworth-Lord didn't employ his normal stock selection procedure to invest in the company, which makes antibodies, after meeting its management at an exhibition. With too little track record to crunch the usual data on his screen he worked "24/7 on it and within five weeks I'd invested. That was very quick for me - I usually take many months to do all the necessary work."

(See Shares I love for more of Mr Ashworth-Lord's share picks)

A number of fund managers have recently been arguing for a return to value-style investing which favours companies with low share prices out of favour with the market. The year so far has not been good to the Conbrio Sanford DeLand UK Buffettology Fund, with "flipping miners" outperforming in January.

But Mr Ashworth-Lord says his (and Warren Buffett's) value style never goes out of favour and over the long term he has proved that point. The fund has returned 96.5 per cent in five years against a FTSE All-Share return of 30 per cent and Investment Association All Companies sector average return of 34.7 per cent.

"I've seen no trend in the last 30 years which suggests that buying a pound for 75p doesn't pay out over the longer term, so I don't look at investing as a choice between growth versus value," he explains. "I just look for reasonable growth prospects in a business and then try to buy what I'm seeing at a knock-down valuation, so I don't see it as a trade-off.

"It's always a great time to be a value investor, it just might not show up for a year or two."