ENGLISH BICKNOR, England — The chickens of the one percent could roost comfortably here.
In this West England village, where sheep seem more abundant than people, a hedge fund manager, Crispin Odey, is close to completing a chicken coop in the style and scale of a small Grecian temple. Screened by walls and vegetation, it has been an object of mystery, though elaborate architectural drawings reveal a sweeping three-sided stairway, two dozen columns and radiating rooftop design flourishes.
If nothing else, the sprawling coop, with a final cost above $250,000, has made Mr. Odey headline fodder. British tabloids called it Cluckingham Palace.
That he built it on the back of Europe’s economic slump has only added to the vitriol for what some feel is an ostentatious display at a time of economic suffering. Mr. Odey profited handsomely during Europe’s financial crisis, including from betting that British banks would falter. The Guardian called his coop a “ fowl extravagance.”
Locals, though, don’t seem to mind. Christopher Lathan, a member of the English Bicknor parish council, said, “I think most people feel that what anyone does on their own land is up to them so long as it affects no one else.”
Ostentation is no stranger to Britain. Even by the standards of the superrich, London has seen a remarkable influx of wealth. Sheiks. Oligarchs. Financiers. Real estate prices soar ever higher and eye-popping inequalities have grown.
Financiers like Mr. Odey, 55, are semi-celebrities. He and his second wife, Nichola Pease, another investment industry stalwart, are sometimes called the Posh and Becks of the financial world, a nod to Britain’s most celebrated nonroyal couple, the Beckhams.
Mr. Odey’s investments are also carefully picked over. Recently he bet against Manchester United. He also demanded that one of his holdings, the German cable provider Sky Deutschland, get a better price from a bidder, BSkyB. That company is largely owned by 21st Century Fox, which is headed by his former father-in-law, Rupert Murdoch.
His profile grew as his flagship $2.3 billion Odey European fund gained 200 percent from the beginning of 2007 through last year, making it one of the best performers among London-based hedge funds despite faltering in 2011. By comparison, the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index returned 30 percent in that period.
This year, his largely charmed run through the crisis came back to earth. In March, his fund fell nearly 8 percent, leaving it down 4.6 percent for the first quarter in what has been a volatile time for hedge fund managers. “The reversal in fortunes has been swift and the destruction intense,” Mr. Odey wrote in a letter to investors in March, adding, “We are down to hand-to-hand fighting.”
His fund has been weighed down by holdings like Sky Deutschland and D. R. Horton, the American home builder.
Anthony Lawler, an executive at GAM, a firm that oversees portfolios of hedge funds for institutional clients, said a number of such funds were hurt by “price reversals in many of the widely held equity long positions from last year,” adding that selling by money managers “fed on itself and led to some painful losses.”
Mr. Odey, gregarious and whimsical in an English gentleman sort of way, concedes as much. “All of us were in what you would call the momentum stocks,” he said in an interview.
Today, he sees the market at a crossroads: “The world economy could turn in many different ways.” Quantitative easing — the purchase of bonds and other financial instruments by central banks to stimulate economies — has been only modestly effective and credit growth has been surprisingly weak, while the business model of banks has become ever more difficult.
He expects more of an American recovery this year, more stagnation in Europe and a reckoning in China, which will be painful for emerging markets.
“China will crumble,” he wrote in his letter.
He is also critical of the status quo in Europe. He once backed the Conservative Party, but now speaks warmly of Nigel Farage, the leader of an increasingly popular party that wants Britain to leave the European Union. “I would rather we were out of Europe,” Mr. Odey said. “It’s probably a protest vote at this point.”
He plays well the patricianly British financial baron. He was educated at Oxford. He wears suspenders. He is engaging and candid, a flurry of activity during an interview. His left hand would reach over his head to scratch his right temple, his right hand would massage his neck, leaving his hair in various states of array and disarray, then both arms would wave for emphasis.
Ups and downs are nothing new. He was born into old money — his father and grandfather ran a leather goods and chemicals company, Barrow Hepburn & Gale. But his father lost his job and ran up debts, forcing Mr. Odey to sell the family estate.
He recalled a lawyer telling him at the time: “You are only 23 years old. Your trustees might have behaved badly, but they were great friends of your father, and they did it for him, not you. It all went wrong and so you start getting annoyed. Go out there and make the money. It’s a much better way of doing it.”
“I remember coming out and thinking, he’s right,” he said, adding, “The fact that I wasn’t as rich as I thought I was going to be gave me a lot of drive.”
He made his mark as a rising star in the investment industry, including a stint at Barings Bank. He did well enough to earn the backing of George Soros when he went out on his own in the early 1990s and set up a classic hedge fund, buying stocks and betting against others by selling short.
Mr. Odey’s firm nearly went belly up in 1994, after taking a big position in government bonds only to have the Federal Reserve unexpectedly raise interest rates.
“The first bear market, you never had one, so it takes your trousers off,” he said. “The second one, basically, because the first one was so painful, you handle it with kid gloves.” The third time, he added: “You get onto the front foot. Just because everybody else is losing money, why should that influence me? This should be an opportunity to make money.”
Now he is preparing for the market’s next phase.
“What killed most people in ’08 was that they couldn’t believe that a Lehman could go, or a Bear Stearns could go, or that anything could change, nor in today’s world can they ever believe that China can be anything other than totemic and strong,” he said.
As he sees it, China’s reliance on an export-driven business model and large current account surpluses to underwrite development can’t continue much longer.
“What happened in 2008 was they got to a size, when the world stopped growing, they stopped growing, so their export markets basically seized up, and they should have seized up on the infrastructure,” he said. “But in fact, what they did was redoubled, and redoubled again, the infrastructure spending.”
He is now only 20 percent net long, reflecting his cautious position. “Despite the fact the world is recovering, you should be a little bit more scared than you’ve been and keep a little bit more cash,” he said.
Never one to sit still, he is also repositioning his poultry palace, which he said had “morphed into a library.” So what is the deal with the coop anyway?
“For me it’s more of a folly than a chicken house,” he said, referring to the ornamental buildings that adorn some of the grand English estates of past centuries.
He gamely showed photos of the nearly completed structure on his iPhone. “Once I started thinking about what I wanted to have there, it was a Schinkelian temple.” Karl Friedrich Schinkel, he explained, was the architect who worked for the Prussian royal family, “and built almost all of that stuff you come across in Brandenburg and in Berlin.”
Mr. Odey pointed to a relief visible along one wall. “I have the chickens and egg having the age-old fight of who came first,” he smiled. “It’s carved in stone,” and there will be a Latin inscription, “Quis primus venit?”
Meaning?
“Meaning, ‘Who came first?’ ”