Spy was sharing several cold lagers this week, with a long-short portfolio manager who said, “There is an old story about an investor who phones his stockbroker and asks him how things are doing in the market. The broker replies that it simply could not be any better. Stocks are roaring, debts are being paid on time, assets everywhere are rising. Truly it, can’t get any better, he re-iterates. Sell now, says the investor to the bewildered broker. If things ‘can’t get any better’ it’s definitely time to sell.” With volatility plunging and most bearish voices exiting stage left with their tails between their legs, Spy can’t help but feel things can’t get much better…
Reddit and Robinhood in the United States gathered large amounts of attention over the last 12 months. Meanwhile, here in Asia notes Spy, in a far less conspicuous fashion, iFast, the owner of FSMone, Singapore’s leading consumer fund platform, has had some stellar growth of its own. It has done so without having any ludicrous cheerleaders or spawning its own set of jargon. By the end of December 2020, assets under administration had grown to a record $14.45bn. The company’s own share price has had a great run rising nearly eight-fold since its nadir last March. It is currently near its all-time high, valuing the firm at $1.71bn. iFast recently won a tender with PCCW to improve and streamline the administration of Hong Kong’s MPF system to boot.
Spy notes that Eastspring Investments has made a new hire to its marketing team in Hong Kong. The Asian asset management giant has pinched Yofi Chan from BNY Mellon Investment Management. Yofi has previously had roles with GAM and BlackRock. Yofi’s new role is senior marketing manager. Spy has no news of Yofi’s replacement at BNY. Eastspring has had success in the last twelve months with its is India Equity Fund, up a healthy 76%.
For those of us sitting in Hong Kong there are times when European and US rhetoric over China seems almost insanely naïve, self-defeating and plain ignorant. Spy tips his hat to the ever-impressive Andy Rothman at Matthews Asia for his recent “Letter to President Biden”, published here. It is filled with the kind of healthy perspective required when thinking about China. It includes this gem of a paragraph, among many others, “China has become entrepreneurial. When I first worked in China during the early 1980s, as a very junior American diplomat, there were no private companies. But small, entrepreneurial private firms now account for almost 90% of urban employment and all net new job creation.” That kind of staggering entrepreneurship growth is driving wealth creation on a grand scale and improving everything around it.
What if your CIO is not a single person, but an entire office? UBS’s Mark Haefele, shared the news this week that the Swiss bank’s CIO Office is now ten years old, beginning back in 2011. When it began a decade ago, it had only three people and now employs over 1,100 today. It includes fifty different nationalities and has eighteen different locations across the world. Few things say to more to Spy about the incredible, global nature of the investment world. There have never been more opportunities and finding them to offer to wealthy investors requires teams that can look anywhere and everywhere.
Is Robeco ready to join Fidelity, BlackRock, ARK and others to take the Bitcoin plunge? A toe in the water, perhaps. Jeroen Blokland, a portfolio manager with the Dutch manager’s multi-asset team, has shared some thoughts, which will only provide succour to the crypto bulls, even if Robeco remains uber cautious. “Research by Robeco’s multi-asset team suggests that bitcoin could be used with a 1% allocation in a standard, well-diversified multi-asset portfolio, providing that certain risk controls and strict portfolio management rules are applied.” Not exactly an unbridled enthusiasm, but the thin edge of the, er, Gouda?
Veneer-thin commentators on Singapore used to say that Singaporeans always wanted the five Cs: condo, car, credit card, cash and a country club. Apparently, during confinement over the last one has really held true. Prices for golf clubs has gone through the roof. Sentosa Golf Club’s membership has gone bananas and now costs $350,000 for locals and an eye-watering $500,000 for expats or foreigners – that is a 40% increase since before Covid wreaked havoc. Spy will have no choice but to stick with watching The Masters on TV, thank you very much.
Do you ever get the impression the media likes to have it both ways? It is easy to be cynical when one sees something like this doing the rounds on idiotic business social media. The reality is always more prosaic. The media carries dozens of opinions, it would be pointless if they all said the same thing.
It must be tough being a billionaire these days. Just when you thought you had joined a truly exclusive club, along comes Forbes to tell you that you are only one of 2,755 individuals with more than $1bn – nearly 30% more than this time last year. When your exclusive ‘club members’ can no-longer all fit in one Airbus A380 at the same time, well, it is hard to feel that special, isn’t it?
Filed in Spy’s “investing self-help” quotes folder, this one comes from Ray Dalio: “If you don’t mind being wrong on the way to being right you’ll learn a lot—and increase your effectiveness. But if you can’t tolerate being wrong, you won’t grow, you’ll make yourself and everyone around you miserable.” Spy wonders what Bill Hwang, who managed to lose $20bn of his personal fortune in just two days, has to think about this…
Slowly, but surely, outdoor life is coming back to normality around the world. And along with it, outdoor advertising is appearing again. Spy’s photographers spotted this ad from Ninety One in Central. The South African firm is promoting its Global Environment Fund.
Until next week…
