GBI – Good Governance Fund – April 2020 report

April saw a remarkable comeback. Following March, where the fund generated alpha as equity markets fell, the fund once again generated alpha during the turnaround. The GBI – Good Governance Fund Class SA was up 13.48% in April, which represents an outperformance over the index of 0.66%, bringing the accumulated outperformance to 10.17% year-to-date and 14.04% since inception.
BY ISABELLE DJIAN

GBI – Good Governance Fund April 2020 monthly report

In terms of sectors, the biggest positive contributors were an overweight allocation to Consumer Discretionary and an underweight allocation to two of the laggards for the month – Financials and Utilities. It was the overweight allocation to Consumer Staples that contributed most negatively to the relative performance, followed closely by an underweight exposure to Energy.

In terms of stocks, contributors to the portfolio included strong gains from Ebay and Apple. While the fund missed out on a big gain from Facebook, it also avoided General Electric, which was one of very few stocks that fell significantly in April.

What the last 14 months have shown is the fund’s ability to generate alpha in many different environments and market directions.  We believe this provides some empirical evidence of the fund’s deliberately agnostic approach to sectors and other investment styles, arguably carving out a place as a standalone factor in the world of investing.

Other posts

NDR Dynamic Allocation Strategy May 2023 Update

BY BRIAN SANBORN
Dynamic Allocation Strategy, indicators, weightings update Read more →

Thoughts From The Divide: Tricks

BY JON WEBB
Perhaps it’s just us, but as the spooky season returns and jack-o-lanterns bedeck porches, we notice that markets and commentators also seem a bit skittish. Maybe it’s the looming election, or perhaps the geopolitical horror shows, but folk seem surprisingly easy to spook. Case in point was the hullabaloo around the $44bn jump in US (government) debt. The hue and cry of folk such as ZeroHedge were enough to get more mainstream interest, including the owner of X and a son of FP Trump, to take notice. The jump is seasonal, as Constan and others pointed out, rather than some ghoulish trick, but of course it’s easy to make fun of those who took fright. But perhaps this misses the point about horror movies. Some argue that the genre works for some because it allows them to push their boundaries and learn the limits of their fears. If that describes you, we recommend reading the CBO Long-Term Budget Outlook. For others, referred to as “dark copers”, the appeal of horror movies might lie in “anxiety or fear that they’re feeling in their life, and they use scary genres like horror to kind of work through those feelings”. Read more →

C8 Weekly Bulletin: AI Investing with Brain

BY JON WEBB
The C8 Weekly Bulletin returns after an Easter break with the announcement that Brain, an AI-driven research provider, has now joined the C8 platform. Brain has developed NODES; an integrated Artificial Intelligence Engine that combines Artificial Intelligence algorithms with proprietary Natural Language Processing techniques to process a large volume of external information. Read more →
Back to all posts →