London hosted a range of Asset Management presentations in early February and I was fortunate enough to have been invited to some of them. By the way of “it was not just fun”, below is a summary of some of the more interesting presentations. Click on the links for the full presentations
Nedgroup Asset Managers held a day and a half conference at the London Stock Exchange which is based in St Paul’s Square, opposite the cathedral.
Topics included the usual suspects, namely Global Macro Economic Outlook, Emerging Markets, Why you cannot trust Management, and Disruptions in the Industry to name just a few.
The three I found most “wow” were:
Presentation 1:
Factfulness: Reasons why we are wrong about the world by Anna Rosling Ronnlund, Co Founder of Gapminder.
Unfortunately, they did not share her presentation (therefore not attached) but you can explore their website at https://www.gapminder.org which I recommend you do.
The Gapminder Foundation started as a spin-off from Professor Hans Rosling’s teaching at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. He encountered broad ignorance about the rapid health improvement in Asia. He started measuring the ignorance among students and professors and the surprising results from the so called “Chimpanzee Test” were presented in his first TED-talk in 2006.
In the test question Hans combined 5 pairs of countries. Each pair had one Asian country and one European country. He asked the students to pick the country in each pair which had twice the child mortality of the other country. If the country names had been written on 5 pairs of bananas, on average the chimpanzee would score 2.5 correct answers. To Hans’s great surprise his Global Health Students performed worse than the chimps, i.e. worse than random. Therefore the wrong answers could not be the results of guessing. They must have been due to preconceived ideas that in a systematic way created and maintained ignorance. Only preconceived ideas can make us perform worse than random. When he replicated the test with the professors at the university, he found their results to be equivalent with those of the chimpanzees.
As a starting point, click on the lick to take the Gap Minder Test http://forms.gapminder.org/s3/test-2018, I got 46%.
Also on the website under the “DOLLAR STREET” tab you will get to see how people really live. Anna and her team have photographed 264 families in different parts of the world as to gather statistical data on how people are really living. For example:
Butoyi family
Monthly income $27 The Butoyi family lives in the province of Makamba, Burundi. Imelda is 41 years old and she works as a farm labourer on land she owns. She has 4 children: The 3 sons, Patrick, 13 years old, Eric, 7 years old and Landri, 4 years old, live with her. While, the daughter Chantal, 9 years old, live with an uncle far away. Imelda works for 60 hours a week. The family lives in a 2-room house, which they built and own, along with some land. They have been living here for 5 years. The house has no electricity and no water. It takes them 40 minutes to collect water from a piped water source that leads mountain water into the valley. They have their own toilet outside the house. The family spends 80% of their budget on food. They cook with wood, so Imelda spends 14 hours a week collecting firewood. The family has no money to save and are not planning to buy anything, but hope one day to be able to fulfil their dream of buying a house. Their most favourite items are their cattle and clothes.
The Butoyi's Stove
Their Bed
Home of Anelisa's family
Monthly income
$240
Anelisa’s family lives in Capetown, South Africa. They are 6 adults and 6 children. Anelisa is 17 years old and she is a student. Her uncle Themba is 47 years old and is unemployed. Her aunt Nondleha is 47 years old and she is a housewife. She lives with her aunt’s family because her aunt took her in at 4 years old when her mother passed away. She lives with her 2 aunts, 3 uncles and 6 cousins. A cousin and an uncle work unskilled manual jobs to earn for the family. All children in the family are students.
The family lives in a 2-bedroom house. They have been living there for the past 50 years. The thing they like about the house is its location, however, they dislike its surroundings. The house has electricity which fails for an hour once a week, indoor toilet facility, and inhouse water supply.
Anelisa’s family buys 90% of their food supplies from the market and manage the rest 10% from gift and other sources. They use electricity to cook their food. Drinking water is also available at their home but isn’t always safe to drink.
The family’s next big plan is to make the house bigger. Their favourite items in the house are books and clothes. They dream of buying their own better house someday.
Anelisa's Stove Their Bed
Further on in the presentation, Anna spoke about where people are moving to as well as increase in GDP per capita.
So why does this matter, specifically to us? Well we are interested in growth areas and an increasing income per person in certain regions means a healthy economy which should present good investment opportunities over time. I am not saying we should all run to China and throw our hard-earned money there, however it is an area that we would look at specifically as emerging markets come back into fashion.
On a last point, Anna presented A practical Guide to critical thinking.
Be sure to go to www.gapminder.org and explore the site and all the useful interactive tools.
Presentation 2:
Dr Linda Yueh presented the Asia’s Outlook, which was a fairly misleading title to her presentation.
Linda Yueh is a British/American economist, broadcaster, and author, born in Taiwan and of dual British and American citizenship. Yueh is an Adjunct Professor of Economics at London Business School, and a Fellow in Economics at St Edmund Hall, Oxford University – where she is director of the China Growth Centre (CGC). She was also a Visiting Professor at Peking University and associated with both the Centre for Economic Performance and IDEAS research centers at the London School of Economics (LSE). She is a TV and radio presenter, including for BBC programs such as Radio 4 Analysis, Business Daily on BBC World Service, and Radio 4 Todayprogramme. From 2013 to 2015, she was Chief Business Correspondent and a Contributing Editor for BBC News when she hosted Talking Business with Linda Yueh, as well as former Economics Editor at Bloomberg Television.
The attached presentation gives a brief overview as what is happening in the world. The most appealing part of her presentation are the below two slides where she spoke BREXIT. As is the title of this article, and what I found from the locals – the Brits are bored of BREXIT and appear not overly concerned.
Dr Yueh laid out 4 options for BREXIT and explored the consequences:
Presentation 3:
The last presentation worth sharing was “Seven Habits of Highly Successful Investors” by Andrew Headley of Veritas Asset Management.
And the seven habits are:
1. Enquiring mind
2. Healthy skepticism
3. Honing judgment
4. Discipline
5. Patience / long-term outlook
6. Independent Mind
7. Humility