STEPHEN CRANSTON: Favourites fall below par
The recovery of some large caps such as Naspers and BAT is starting to help managers
Much as I agree that too much quarteritis leads to unnecessary ulcers, it is useful to see how funds behave at some inflection points. The conversations between trustees, consultants and fund managers will be quite different from three months ago. All the funds in the Alexander Forbes Large Manager Watch gave negative returns in the year and quarter to December, so understandably there was a chorus asking to get out of the market and preserve capital. But the large managers all gave positive returns in the year and quarter to March 2019. With the shareholder weighted index (Swix) up 6% in just three months and global equities up 13% in rand terms, even the most inept manager would have been able to give positive returns. (Swix is used widely by fund managers as a benchmark of their equity performance.) Investors, however, are not yet enjoying the risk premium the textbooks tell us we should earn from high equity investments. With returns ranging from 8.5% for Stanlib down to 5.8% fo...
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