The finance chief of a multinational, publicly-traded asset manager with big business in the United Kingdom is winning public recognition for hedging about 75-percent of the mutual fund shop's pound-based income against Brexit fallout.

Justin Baer and Sarah Krouse of the Wall Street Journal report that Invesco chief financial officer Loren Starr "bought a series of put options on the pound aimed at insulating the firm's earnings from the currency's declining value against the U.S. dollar." Thanks to UK voters choosing to leave the European Union, "those hedges are now worth more than $20 million."

"Right now we're feeling like we've got a good long year worth of protection and we're going to enjoy it," Starr tells the paper.

Kenneth Hill, an analyst at Barclays, tells the WSJ that he doesn't "recall anyone else hedging that explicitly."

The paper notes that last year the UK accounted for about 21 percent of Invesco's revenue. Mister Market has thus punished Invesco in the wake of the Brexit vote. Invesco's shares fell 19.5 percent in the first four days after the vote, though they've since bounced back a bit; as of Friday, July 8 at market close, Invesco's shares were down 10.91 percent since the vote, compared to rises of 2.06 percent for the Dow and 2.12 percent for the S&P 500. 

Edited by: Neil Anderson, Managing Editor


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