Investment Insights
FSSA Manager Views - Asian Growth
July 2021
“Revenue is vanity, profit is sanity, but cash is reality.” Anon
In boom times like today, when cash costs nothing and capitalisation rates are zero, everybody is focused on growth and the future. Revenue is vanity in the sense that entrepreneurs, thank goodness, dare to dream and build businesses. We too, spend much of our time looking for the next opportunity and indeed thinking about how much businesses can grow.
FSSA Investment Managers - Asian Growth Update
June 2021
Optimism is the madness of insisting that all is well when we are miserable.” Voltaire
Though Covid hasn’t yet finished with us, the markets have finished with Covid. In real life, there is still plenty of misery to go around, but things have seldom been better for investors. Optimism has served us well, as the money-printing presses have rolled to counter the “unprecedented” threat. In investment, perhaps it is better to be a stupid optimist than a clever pessimist. And, markets do indeed go up most of the time.
FSSA Investment Managers - Asian Growth Update
January 2021
“Freedom is always the freedom to think otherwise.” Rosa Luxemburg
In our last client update, written through the depths of Covid-despair, we observed that real life and the world of markets are seldom so intimately entwined. With markets swinging violently to the downside on a riptide of fear, it was clear even then that activity was being driven by short-term anxiety rather than a real evaluation of Asia’s longer-term value-accretion prospects.
FSSA Investment Managers - Asian Equity Plus / Asia Pacific All-Cap Update
August 2020
Broadly, we believe quality companies, led by effective management teams operating dominant franchises, are best placed to weather the challenges in an uncertain world. Since the establishment of this team more than three decades ago, the Asia Pacific region has witnessed numerous crises, but we have seen quality companies emerge from such events even stronger than before. While every downturn is different, this principle remains central to our investment philosophy and underpins our stock selection in the region.
FSSA Investment Managers - Asian Growth Update
June 2020
All of us have been brutally confronted by a new reality in the last few months. It has certainly been crude, with financial markets swinging around on a riptide of greed and fear, as we the participants have vacillated between elation and despair. It is not surprising. Life and the world of markets are seldom so intimately entwined.
FSSA Investment Managers - Asia Pacific Equities Update
November 2019
Modern life seems characterised by extremes, with division and discord the defining features. But, we are living in revolutionary times. Sweeping technological change impacts everything, everywhere. It is an age of accelerated disruption. From politics to trade, all is exaggerated and amplified by social media. Life and society are moving at an ever-faster pace. In the world of finance, the lowest interest rates in our two-thousand-year history have been similarly revolutionary and impactful.
FSSA Investment Managers - Asia Pacific Equities Update
May 2019
Although financial types everywhere seem to believe that things are absolutely dire, world-ending and the sky is about to fall on our heads, most of humanity have better lives now than in all of history. That is certainly so in the developed world. Prosperity, in our time, has yet again been underwritten by those clever technocrats at the world’s central banks.
FSSA Investment Managers - Asia Pacific Equities Update
August 2018
Since our last letter, there has been more activity in our Asia portfolios than usual. All change; and yet no change. In the real world, despite all the excitable commentary, it is worth remembering that nothing bad or too unexpected has happened. Earnings per share (EPS) growth has, if anything, been better than expected. All seems relatively calm for now, but there is a sense that the macro-plates are shifting. Our absolute returns remain respectable, while the relative gains are ticking along incrementally month-by-month.
FSSA Investment Managers - Asia Pacific Equities Update
November 2017
It was John Templeton who famously skewered that old bull market hubris: “It’s different this time,” as the four most expensive words in the history of investment. But, it is different this time, isn’t it? Well, yes and no. The combination of all-time low interest rates, massive money printing and quiescent inflation is unique. It is different and has rolled on for much longer than we expected.
FSSA Investment Managers - Asia Pacific Equities Update
January 2017
Our general cautious stance and positioning across our Asia Pacific portfolios have not changed very much at all over the last six-to-nine months. In our last review, we concluded that things were about to get messy. Are we now witnessing something of a revolution? In this latest update, we discuss recent ‘surprise’ political events and provide update on our Asia Pacific strategy.
FSSA Investment Managers - Asia Pacific Equities Update
May 2016
In this latest update on Asia Pacific equities, we provide some insights into our current portfolio positioning and a performance review of the regional Asia Pacific funds.