It is said that a traditional stock picker’s greatest weakness is not knowing when to sell. If a share is rising, the temptation is to hold it for that little bit longer, to see if it will go up further. If it slumps, loss aversion causes paralysis. So Roger Yates, the chief executive of Henderson Global Investors who announced his retirement this morning, aged 51, deserves credit for deciding to exit his current career at the top.

Yates took over as chief executive in 1999, when Henderson Investors was suffering a variety of performance and integration issues, fresh from its acquisition by the Australian financial services group AMP.