In the course of a normal month we’ll highlight 60-70 manager changes in equity and allocation funds. We mostly skip bond funds because, frankly, it’s a danged rare fixed income team that’s materially affected by the departure of a single individual. In a really quiet month, 38 funds saws partial or complete team changes. That’s not only half the long-term average but only about a third of the changes reported last month.

By far the most significant, if only symbolically, was the announced retirement of David Poppe at Sequoia Fund (SEQUX). Mr. Poppe was famously a champion of the Valeant investment that broke Sequoia. The magnitude of the misstep was reported by Chuck Jaffe in 2016:

Indeed, when Morningstar first started evaluating funds in the mid-1980s, analysts there privately used a “Sequoia-Steadman” standard, effectively comparing other funds to what they considered the best fund in the industry — Sequoia — or the worst, the now-defunct Steadman Funds.

Today, however, Sequoia itself has been acting more like Steadman. It posted a dismal 7.3% loss in 2015, which has been followed up with a decline of 11.6% so far this year, both returns near the bottom of the fund’s large-growth peer group.

But the real problem has been Sequoia’s management stubbornness, infighting, and governance issues, all centered around the fund’s investment in controversial Valeant Pharmaceuticals International US:VRX which at one point last year accounted for 30% of the $5.6 billion fund’s assets (it’s closer to 20% recently).

Now the question is whether Harris, Gokgol-Kline, Magyar and Sheridan can restore the legacy created by Ruane, Cunniff and Goldfarb.

By far the most consequential change was the departure of Mark Yockey and Charles-Henri Hamker from Artisan International Small Cap. Their successor, Rezo Kanovich, is another phenomenally successful manager with a very different portfolio in mind. The fund’s evolution will be signaled in the month ahead by being renamed Artisan International Small-Mid Fund. There are some details in this month’s “Briefly Noted” and we’ll share additional information in a Launch Alert as soon as the name change is official.