Hamish Douglass, the man once branded a rock star of investing who breathed the positive fumes of being hailed as Australia’s answer to Warren Buffett, has opened up about his sexuality, his mental health and life after the rumour mill.
His emotional decline, his personal challenges and the shrinking of the business he co-founded, Magellan Financial Group, makes for tough listening.
It has taken Douglass four years to build the resilience to be able to publicly own his sexual status as a gay man, his mental health crisis, and discuss how he has come through to the other side.
In an interview with Joe Aston’s Rampart, Douglass unpacks the coalescence of factors including the breakdown of his marriage, the toxic rumours about his sexuality and Magellan’s decline that led him to a place so dark that he at times flirted with ending his life. Aston, himself, was among the first to write about rumours of Douglass’ marriage failure.
The tale of Douglass’ professional fortunes is one of a man who flew too close to the sun.
He leant on his rock-star investment manager status to promote Magellan, which attracted billions of investment dollars into its products in a relatively short period of time.
But it was the fund manager’s underperformance in the aftermath of COVID that resulted in investors abandoning Magellan.
As Douglass’ professional and personal walls were closing in on him, he professed to become fearful of waking up in the morning, and the daily barrage of press was toxic.
It had been wrong-footed and over-optimistic about China, and saw its returns penalised after that country’s regulatory crackdown.
Douglass’ halo had already lost its gloss before news of his marriage breakdown or the departure of Magellan’s chief executive, Brett Cairns, became issues.
The company was already under pressure.
Because of Douglass’ deliberately elevated profile as the company’s key man, he became the focus of Magellan’s problems. By 2022 he had a target on his back.
In Magellan’s backing of a breakaway new investment bank, Barrenjoey, which had headhunted many financial operatives from competitors, Douglass made plenty of enemies.
There were many Magellan shareholders understandably dismayed by their returns but also plenty of competitors with a vested financial interest in highlighting the company’s failures.
There were people betting Magellan’s shares would continue to fall. It was a lucrative trade – in the space of a year from mid-2021 to mid-2022 the stock fell around 70 per cent.
When the news broke of Douglass’ marriage breakdown it prompted a feasting frenzy about his sexuality – generating inaccurate rumours around financial industry drinking holes about alleged trysts with young Asian men and even a supposed relationship with one of his children’s friends.
With it also came rumours that Cairns had resigned because of moral disgust.
“Neither of these facts are true at all. It was being implied that I was a kind of paedophile having a relationship. And then it got into different stories, there were Asian boys involved … these rumours were spreading all over the place.”
Douglass said he was “gobsmacked” by these falsehoods.
So extreme was the negative chatter that Douglass says had a Jeffrey Epstein vibe – some of which, he confesses, still echoes around Sydney four years later.
In 2022, the board of Magellan announced Douglass was to take indefinite medical leave, after his mental health had reached a point where he was on the verge of suicide.
“Had my wife not picked me up at that moment, I don’t think I would be here today,” he said in the Rampart podcast.
As Douglass’ professional and personal walls were closing in on him, he professed to becoming fearful of waking up in the morning, and the daily barrage of press was toxic.
He had suffered an extreme mental breakdown from which it has taken years to recover.
Today Magellan is a long way from its heyday when it boasted $115 billion in funds under management. The slimmed-down company had fewer than $40 billion when it last reported its numbers. While its recent move to buy out Barrenjoey will usher in a new chapter in Magellan’s history, the funds management business is a shadow of its former size.
For Douglass, the story is one of recovery rather than redemption. He has sold most of his personal stake in Magellan and has no management role.
But he has sufficiently recovered his mental health to take the brave decision to talk about coming out the other side and to address some of the stigmas around being gay that remain in the business community.
