STEPHEN CRANSTON: Time for the big cull?
There are still too many asset managers and portfolios to choose from
I don’t remember any analyst predicting three years ago that we were entering a golden age for world government bonds. Yet it has been the best asset class in rands, with a welcome 12.3% annual return over the three years to September 30 2020.Nor was there much enthusiasm for domestic bonds. Yet the return on the all bond index since September 2017 has been 7.3%; it might look pedestrian, but is still a real return of more than 3%.There were murmurings about poor corporate governance in local property shares, thanks to the increasingly opaque structure of the Resilient Group, but few warnings to shun property stocks entirely — ahead of the huge 23.8% annual decline in that sector.Poor local market returns didn’t just start on the day of the lockdown in March. Over the past three years the shareholder weighted index, still the most popular equity benchmark in SA, fell by 0.4% a year.So you might expect conservative funds, which can invest only 40% of their assets in equities — with a...
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