New Allan Gray CIO Duncan Artus: What’s next at SA’s largest private investment firm
Allan Gray's Duncan Artus is preparing to take the reigns as the Chief Investment Officer (CIO) of South Africa's largest privately owned investment firm from September. Allan Gray has about R500bn in assets under management, with a fair chunk of this managed offshore through Orbis. With the volatile investment market and unpredictable global economy, can Artus build on the solid foundation set by his predecessors? In this interview with BizNews founder Alec Hogg and stock market expert David Shapiro, the CIO designate reveals his plans for the future and why he believes that managing money is not only about numbers but about managing emotions, too. – Ronda Naidu
AH: Duncan Artus, the new Chief Investment Officer designate, because he only takes over in September. Dave Shapiro, before we asked Duncan Artus about various bits and pieces in his new role, have you got anything to ask now that he's going to be the guy who looks after these gazillions that are entrusted to Allan Gray?
DS: I'm a great Allan Gray follower. I get all their documents, etc. and they're true to where they've always been and always had a very specific style of investing. You have to ask Duncan as CIO, if he's going to move off this path or whether he's still going to remain loyal to the way that I have always managed portfolios, especially the kind of environment that we find ourselves now?
DA: Yes, we've been doing the same thing for almost 47 years and most asset managers that are independent of a life company or investment bank don't last that long. Some people move, some people start fighting. You have periods of underperformance and outperforming the benchmark is hard over long periods of time.
What's worked for 45 years, would you want to change it? No, but we're always making incremental changes. If you look in South Africa each little bit you outperform is more valuable than it was when I started. There are a lot more good competitors and the South African equity market has got a lot more competitors about. So every little incremental improvement you can make to your process, a good example for us is a fixed income fund. People think of us as equity and balanced managers, but our best performance over the last year has come from our fixed interest portion of the portfolio. We spent a lot of time improving the process. It's all about improving processes.
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