Notes from my inbox

TRUST IS STILL EARNED

Our latest advertising campaign takes a light-hearted look at a serious subject: a misadventure in a tattoo parlour, a potentially counterfeit note, a chatbot so eager to please that it downplays essential information, a pyramid scheme, a fake headline, and a dating profile that was generous with the truth. In every case, something or someone asks for trust without having done the work to deserve it.

The humour works because the problem is real. We have more information than ever and less reason to believe it. Convincing text, images, and voices can now be produced cheaply and on demand, so ‘credibility’ is easier to fake than it has ever been. The investment industry has always had its own versions: smooth returns, capital guarantees – promises that sound better than the arithmetic allows.

We introduced ‘Trust Is Earned™’, the tagline we still use, in 2010. At the time, we wrote that choosing a fund manager is a decision about whom to trust, and that you may only be able to judge the result decades later. We said then that in investments, trust rests on two things: integrity and consistent long-term performance. That has not changed. What has also not changed is our focus on sustaining this foundation in how we run our business. Examples include:

• We are independent, so our decisions are not set by a distant head office with objectives that may conflict with client delivery.
• We remain solely focused on managing money for our clients, consistently declining opportunities to vertically integrate into advice and distribution. Not because it’s bad business, but because it ensures that every rand that comes to us arrives because our clients chose us on merit.
• Our people own 33% of the business, so we carry the consequences of our decisions alongside you.
• Much of our people's remuneration is deferred over the long term, so their time horizon is aligned to the portfolio evaluation period we ask our clients to adopt.
• We maintain a focused fund range with clear risk budgets and return objectives, so there is less temptation to chase the latest fad.
• We say plainly what we think is achievable, including when we expect returns to be modest, and when we have been wrong.

Earning trust includes being candid about disappointment, and recent short-term investment performance has provided some. Our local equity portfolios underperformed the gold-heavy local market in 2025 and have done little more than keep pace with the benchmark in 2026. Our global equity portfolios had a good 2025 but are lagging year to date, largely because of our overweight position in digital businesses that the market fears AI may disrupt. We know that periods of short-term underperformance will test your patience. We are continuously revisiting our assumptions, valuation models, and portfolio holdings (see our fund commentaries for more) to ensure they remain appropriate.  

While we cannot predict when markets will agree with our views, we remain convinced that our current equity portfolios provide attractive long-term opportunities for investors who are prepared to remain patient.

The humour in our current campaign is quick, yet we know building trust is slow. While a tagline is easy to repeat, living up to it is the important part. We remain singularly committed to delivering on your behalf, so that we remain worthy of your trust.

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