Investment Community #10

Rowan Williams-Short, head of fixed-income at Vunani Fund Managers, was my special guest on the Investment Community podcast.

In this episode (part 1 of 3), Rowan tells:

* How he naturally understood probabilities as a kid playing board games with dice, and how his maths and stats training honed his ability to deal with more complex probability problems.

* How most market participants are unable to think probabilistically, and how that creates investment opportunities.

* How he developed deep respect for unknowns in the securities markets, and how that informs his philosophy of inference.

We also discussed:

* The folly of making point-forecasts of company earnings without including confidence intervals.

* That SA equity investors for the last decade have had to get only two big calls right: Naspers/Prosus and the platinum stocks.

* That investment excellence is undermined by a focus on asset-gathering, and that maintenance-research is a poor utilisation of expensive resources.

Rowan Williams-Short is head of fixed-income at Vunani Fund Managers. He began his investment career in 1989 at Old Mutual as a fixed income and equity-derivatives analyst, and became a fixed-interest portfolio manager and head of derivatives. In 1994 he co-founded Prudential Portfolio Managers (SA), which is now M&G Investments. As CIO, he was responsible for all equity, fixed-income, and balanced funds. He joined African Harvest in 1999, where he was CIO and later CEO. In 2004 Rowan joined Nedgroup Investments in London as their global CIO. Then in 2007, he founded Orthogonal Investments, where he was CIO and responsible for all equity, fixed-income, balanced, and hedge funds. Orthogonal was taken over by Peregrine Quant, which later became Vunani Fund Managers.

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