Investment insights
Our unwavering commitment to the same investment philosophy, through turmoil and triumph over four decades of investing, is what makes us different. Here we offer some insight into how we think about investing and our investment process.
Articles in "Investment insights"
Trends shaping the future of investment management
The commonly accepted wisdom is that if we want a glimpse into the future of South Africa’s financial services sector, we should take a look at the United...
How to be a little less wrong – with James Aitken
When it comes to investing, marginal improvements can make a significant difference to investment returns over time. In conversation with Allan Gray’s chief...
Looking to the long term
Turning 50 is an incredible milestone for any business. Over the last five decades, South Africa has experienced immense political, economic and societal...
Personal reflections on what makes a great asset manager over the long term
Given that we are in our 50th year of existence, Duncan Artus, who has been working at Allan Gray for over 22 years, reflects on what he believes makes a gre...
Investment lessons from the Springboks
With the Springboks having successfully kicked off their Rugby World Cup title defence campaign in France, Braam Visser draws some interesting parallels...
The power of 1%
As we celebrate our 50 th anniversary, we are mindful of the collective efforts of teams, past and present, in building our long-term track record....
Four contrarian investment questions to ask in 2023
Jacques Plaut, portfolio manager, shares the four questions investors should consider this year and discusses how the Allan Gray Balanced Fund is positioned ...
The importance of alignment
We believe that the price you pay an investment manager for managing your money should be aligned with the value they create for you over the long term. Sale...
Which currency is a good store of value?
As the US dollar continues to make substantial gains on global currencies, Jacques Plaut, portfolio manager, discusses the factors investors typically consid...
How do you cater for extreme events when constructing resilient multi-asset portfolios?
Gladness Rupare and Martine Damonse, who hosted panels with members of the Allan Gray and Orbis Investment teams, capture some of key questions and insights,...
Podcast: How to think about investing in an energy-short and volatile world
From the global technology stock sell-off and rising inflation, to the war in Ukraine exacerbating a global energy crisis, investors are tasked with navigati...
Is there value in our investment style?
Understanding your investment manager’s style may give you a deeper appreciation of how they will perform in different circumstances, and therefore help you...
How to invest to be crisis ready
COVID-19 has driven home an important life lesson: Expect (and plan for) the unexpected. When it comes to your finances, this means balancing the need to hav...
Key questions that advisers and clients are asking
Uncertainty is a fact of life, and ever present in investing. There are times, however, when uncertainty seems to dominate sentiment and news flow – and...
Orbis: Crypto – currency or collectible?
It is widely accepted that distributed ledger technology, such as blockchain, has enormous potential. Like many new technologies it could be truly...
In pursuit of value
The current disparity in markets, both locally and offshore, is creating an opportunity for bottom-up investors like ourselves to generate meaningful returns...
Investment lessons from a pandemic year
A year on from our stringent Level 5 lockdown, much of 2020 seems surreal. While there are many aspects we may prefer to forget, reflection reveals valuable...
Podcast: A candid conversation with Orbis' Adam Karr
Taking a long-term, contrarian approach has influenced every aspect of how we invest and do business at Orbis and Allan Gray. From the way the firms are...
Predicting the unpredictable
“It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.” Mark Twain
Orbis: The power of perspective
It is easy to get caught up in the noise of short-term events like politics. What we have learned over the past 30 years is that a long-term view often revea...
Is your trust in your investment manager well placed?
It has been a volatile six months in the markets, following a five-year period of disappointing equity returns. At times like these, it is understandable for...
The uncertainty spectrum
Wildfires in Australia, mass protests in the US, a global pandemic. These are just some of the events that have roiled markets this year, leaving investors...
The framing fallacy
We humans are fallible creatures who suffer from several cognitive biases. Using the COVID-19 pandemic as an example, Rory Kutisker-Jacobson highlights how...
Part 4: How to invest to be crisis ready
COVID-19 has driven home an important life lesson: Expect (and plan for) the unexpected. When it comes to your finances, this means balancing the need to hav...
Will growth stocks beat value stocks forever?
Markets move up and down and investment styles move in and out of favour. With value investing being on the wrong side of the trend for around 12 years,...
The money bubble
There’s something magical about bubbles. Formed of water, soap and a breath of air they seem incredible. In financial markets, bubbles are a lot less revered...
Allan's legacy: Investment thinking
Our founder, Allan Gray, developed the distinctive investment philosophy that has been in place since Allan Gray and Orbis were founded. He also had an...
Is the US headed for a market meltdown?
As the S&P 500 and Nasdaq seem set to continue to record new highs, some market analysts believe that the current raging US bull market may be in for a nasty...
Mindful of risk
Uncertain times may cause investors to shy away from risk. While it is important to be mindful of risk and understand the risks you are taking on when...
Are you comfortable swimming against the tide?
Allan Gray and our offshore partner, Orbis, describe our shared investment approach as “contrarian”. “Contrarian” is usually defined as “opposing or rejectin...
Will Value ever be fashionable again?
Fashion trends tend to move in cycles. Anyone who lived through the 1990s and kept wearing their Doc Martens and bright neon colours would have spent 25 year...
A matter of index
When evaluating an investment, performance is often top of mind for would-be investors. The next consideration should be how well the investment stacks up...
Managing risk through our investment process
Our primary objective is to build long-term wealth for our clients. To do this, we balance investment performance with the risk incurred in generating this...
Is your portfolio overly concentrated?
South Africa has a relatively small equities market with a handful of dominant shares, spread across a few sectors, which are available to invest in. This...
Investing in the rise of electric vehicles
The consumer appeal of electric vehicles has increased over the last 10 years, with manufacturers in a race to ramp up development and production of...
Our approach to portfolio construction
Our investment approach is simple: We do careful research to identify good value businesses, buy shares when they trade below our assessment of fair value an...
Orbis: Think like a business owner
Say you own a small stake in a company. Every day, one of your partners tells you what he thinks the business is worth, and he offers to buy your stake or se...
Skilled Investing: Separating the wheat from the chaff
The difference between skilled and lucky investment managers is that over extended periods, skill should prevail in delivering good investment outcomes, whil...
How to spot investment red flags
South Africa has been rocked by a series of corporate scandals in recent years that have sent the share prices of former blue-chip companies like Steinhoff a...
Do you enjoy pain? How about the platinum industry?
Over the past two years we have invested in certain platinum mining companies. These investments have performed extremely poorly. Andrew Lapping looks back a...
Finding opportunity in the volatility
The first quarter proved to be a difficult one with the Allan Gray Equity, Balanced and Stable Funds all delivering negative returns. The most significant...
Long-term investing should have nothing to fear from the Viceroys
Activist short sellers have been a prominent feature in stock markets for many years. It’s easy to get caught up in the hype when their ideas hit the news....
Study reveals reliance on recent performance in picking unit trusts
Shaheed Mohamed surveyed more than 400 financial advisers in South Africa to identify attributes that financial advisers in South Africa consider when...
Investment lessons from 2017: be patient and trust your analysis
Separating oneself from the noise is tricky. There is an enormous amount of information out there; you can listen to experts on television, read newspapers,...
The value of bitcoin
The total market value of all bitcoins is US$80bn, which is more than the value of Richemont and triple the value of Anglo American. It is the topic on which...
Corporate governance and shareholder responsibility
What is the role of a shareholder and where does their responsibility end? Listen to this 10 minute interview with Andile Khumalo on PowerFM as Richard Carte...
What to focus on when choosing shares and other assets
How do you distinguish a good investment from a lemon? And how do you create a well-diversified portfolio? Listen to this 15-minute interview on PowerFM...
Did we get lucky?
The Allan Gray domestic equity strategy delivered returns of 17.2% for the 12 months ending September 2016, after having subtracted all fees and costs. The...
Orbis: We welcome the rise of passive investing
The Wall Street Journal ran a series this month commemorating the rise of passive investing. The articles make ‘the case for the triumph of passive’, calling...
How to select an investment manager
Focusing on past performance is often the first and only port of call for investors when trying to differentiate between investment managers. But there is no...
Nuanced numbers and valuation pitfalls
We pick shares for client portfolios following a rigorous, bottom-up, fundamental research process. This involves, among many other considerations, the caref...
Investing tutorial: Our approach to value investing
Our investment philosophy and process is so much part of our DNA that we forget not all clients are familiar with what we actually do and how we make our...
How things change
Global mining businesses have had a remarkable fall from grace over the past 18 months. Talk has moved from a 20-year supercycle and commodity shortages to...
Asset allocation: Top down, or bottom up?
Within a multi-asset class balanced portfolio , there are different ways to manage the asset allocation. Some managers prefer to follow a ‘top-down’ strategy...
SA mining and the sunk cost fallacy
Ian Liddle discusses why the challenges in South African mining provide an interesting case study of the 'sunk cost fallacy', a behavioural bias that sees us...
Avoiding the overwhelming bias for action
In life, we have a natural bias for action. From a young age, we are told stories about heroes who overcame great odds and many setbacks to do something grea...
What is a PE ratio?
Central to our investment philosophy at Allan Gray is buying shares that the market has priced below what we believe they are worth. We then sell these share...
The upside to downside protection
Warren Buffet famously said that there are two rules when investing, 'Rule No.1: Never lose money, Rule No.2: Never forget rule No.1.' Shaun Duddy discusses...
Building an investment team that thrives (not just survives) on generational transition
We aim to provide you with benchmark-beating investment returns for at least the next 100 years. But we can succeed in this ambition only for as long as we a...
It is the price you pay that counts, not the headlines
People enjoy stories; they are fun. This is true in all facets of life, including investing. Investors often have stories to tell about individual equities,...
The risk that matters
Discussions about investing are incomplete without including the topic of risk. Delphine Govender elaborates, focusing on the most important risk in investin...
Happy equilibrium
Duncan Artus discusses the implications of the growth in the local asset management industry being focused on asset managers who variously describe their...
The role dividends play in generating returns
In the previous edition of the Quarterly Commentary, Richard Carter and Roenica Botha demonstrated the importance of reinvesting income distributions from un...
