Asymmetric Risk & Absolute Return

We take a holistic approach to investing in equities. Every investment is subject to the overall total portfolio risk profile, liquidity needs and investing horizon objectives of each client. We spend time with each client learning, understanding and continually calibrating with them their risk profiles to investments. With transparent flexibility that sometimes means managing or advising clients to preserve wealth by temporarily holding residual levels of cash. This active rather than responsive approach to capital protection is, and has proven to be, a critical risk management tool and very effective in the protection of compounded capital. Aligned with clients we see our role as independent wealth managers and investment advisors not cramped by commissions, value of funds invested or short-term institutional surveys.

OUR DIFFERENTIATION is the asymmetric focus on risks and absolute returns. Our first priority is to preserve capital at the portfolio level. Ignoring market index structures and index benchmarking distractions we first focus on the risk of losing money. Our clients are typically loss averse – where the penalty from a dollar lost is greater than the profit from a dollar gained.

OUR STYLE is long-term and fundamental. Managing and advising on concentrated portfolios, we spend considerable time filtering investment opportunities ensuring we don’t get caught-up in market ‘noise’ that can destroy portfolio wealth.

OUR DISCIPLINE includes patience – however we have strong sell signals. A change in a company’s key issues will see us immediately take action to assist preserve wealth and protect portfolios.

OUR CORE PHILOSOPHY in all of our activities is that investing is about the future; the unknown.

We do not believe that spending time, resources or having an army of analysts spend time pin-point forecasting is useful. We recognise the inherently wealth-destructive behavioural errors that occur when analysts ‘fall-in and-out-of-love’ with stocks, become ‘blind’ with over-confidence and or rely on the ‘authoritative’ views of company management.

Rather we continually search for multiple alternative outcomes across a wide breadth of views and then model and analyse the impact of such outcomes on companies and their share prices. This multiple scenario thinking is at the core of our risk process and philosophy. Through our disciplined, curiosity-based framework we constantly examine if alternative outcomes are expected by the market and or whether such shifts in expectations can create opportunities to create wealth for our clients.

Investing is a journey and not a destination. The ability to know when to act and when not to act are our strongest assets. Humility, patience and courage are character attributes that exponentially reward the journey – and are essential to remain outside of the investing herd.