Emperor Blog
2018 has come and gone and we look back on a year which can be characterised by political uncertainty, a struggling economy locally and to end off the JSE closed with its worst year since the Financial Crisis in 2008. The US had a strong performance in the first three quarters powered by the Trump tax cut and higher earnings, however the stock markets pulled back heavily at the end of the year mainly due to uncertainty around the US-China trade deal and the continued emphasis on the Fed’s Monetary tightening and its impacts.
The Emperor team has been hard at work with several initiatives through 2018 which we eluded to in our June 2018 announcement.
The first of which was welcoming our new Fund Manager, Shaun Krom to the Emperor stable. Shaun brings with him a vast amount of experience within Investment Management, both Locally and Internationally, and we are excited about the impact he is making;
Secondly, we concluded a comprehensive review of our Investment methodology which resulted in some significant enhancements. We moved away from our momentum bias to a more agile approach using big data where we now dynamically invest across momentum, value, quality and low volatility strategies (local and offshore) to create combined portfolios that we are confident will deliver outperformance to our clients;
We broadened our Product offering to cover all client requirements across the risk spectrum, included risk targeted portfolios from Income through to Growth as well as a full suite of retirement (Reg 28) portfolios (including RA and Preservation funds). We encourage you to peruse our new website at www.emperor.co.za to find learn more. All our products are listed on EasyEquities and we urge you to register for an account;
Last but not least as published in the Purple Group annual results and as part of a group wide name change which will see Purple Group re-named to Easy Investment Holdings limited and Emperor Asset management will be re-named to Easy Investment Managers.
We have now concluded a thorough review of both the Leveraged Equity RFS strategy and the 140/40 SJR strategy for 2018 which you can find below:
Leveraged Equity RFS – 2018 Review
Long Short 140/40 SJR – 2018 Review
Looking forward into 2019
Our strategies continue to be conservatively positioned to SA Inc forgoing momentum and concentrating our exposure to those securities that exhibit quality, stability and value characteristics. Historically, these factors have outperformed during less bullish market cycles. We continue with our momentum exposure to US markets although we have cut down on our position size and technology exposure.
After much research, we have refined our investment models and we are satisfied that our approach can out-perform in the current market cycle. We are satisfied in our knowledge that we will not catch every market dislocation as happened in September-December, but that over the long term, our approach has the highest probability of out-performing the market with an acceptable level of risk relative to the benchmark.
We appreciate your ongoing support and look forward to what 2019 has in store.
Kind regards
The Emperor Team