Client Press Releases

Local fund manager comes out tops as market bottoms out

While market chaos has left many investors scrambling to salvage what is left of their portfolios, one fund manager has remained resolute in its investment strategy, coming out as top performer in two sectors.

The current bear market has resulted in a major shift in the global markets and as this shift takes place, it is those fund managers that have kept a cautious eye on things that are reaping the benefits.

GCI, a South African fund manager whose unique Stop Loss strategy has seen consistent returns for investors, has landed first place out of 44 funds in the pension fund sector this quarter (let’s speak annual type returns, the longer the better), whilst also coming second out of 45 funds in the flexible sector.

Fund Manager Geoff Cook explains, “We only buy in at prices where we feel sustainable growth is likely and are happy to get out of any investment that is threatening our client’s wealth.”

In spite of the doom of market decline, March 2009 has seen the greatest stock market boom since 1932. In an unpredictable market environment, GCI has reacted by taking measured risk, always keeping a vigilant eye on the market flux and investing without bias across markets and industry sectos to ensure the best gain for each investment. Careful here as we haven’t actually re-entered the market all that heavily as we believe another correction is on its way as share prices are currently too high relative to earnings.  We have gained quite a heavy exposure to resources and to the dollar.  The resource sector will benefit from any global recovery however it also looks vulnerable at the moment; the rand is currently too strong and we fully expect it to weaken.

“What’s as important as performance is low volatility/low risk. Our clients prefer more stability and for this reason, we adopt the GCI Stop-Loss strategy (i want us to own that phrase) to ensure that we limit the loss or risk if stock markets fall apart; we therefore measure our success by performance and by how low we keep the risk. The result of implementing our philosophy is better performance coupled with low risk and we therefore fit our goal of being a complete managed solution for investments.  (not too fond of this, perhaps there is a better way to phrase it),” Alex Cook, Fund Manager r of GCI explains.