Investment Community #11

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

In this episode (part 2 of 3), Rowan tells:

* How his investment performance improved when he stopped trying to be a hero, i.e. when he deliberately decided to not be quite so ambitious about his numbers.

* How making forecasts in financial markets is a perilous activity: you have to be both right and in the minority.

* How he found only 10% of the international hedge-fund managers that he interviewed to be “intriguing”. The rest were “desperately underwhelming” or worse.

We also discussed:

* That large investment teams do have the advantage of better coverage than small teams, but that is not necessarily helpful in generating better returns.

* That the CIO of a large team will tend to inadvertently rebuild their index in client portfolios, ironically because of a deficit in people skills.

* That hiring the right people for your investment team is the most important investment decision, requiring significant amounts of time and energy.

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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