We can send you eloquent stories about our outlook and convictions of the market environment and how we are positioned all we like, but what really matters is how our portfolio as a whole reacts when the markets get really tough. September was a pretty decent proxy for a really tough market, with the JSE index declining by 6% and the Rand strengthening. At one point, just a few days before the end of the month, the JSE was down over 10% for the month.

Our portfolio took this in its stride, with the fund down 2.3% in September. This is an example of what we really mean when we talk about the ‘robustness’ of our portfolio and its individual building blocks.

What helped us the most was our continued significant holding in cash, and bonds. Cash is an often misunderstood and under-appreciated asset class, but it truly comes into its own when a month like September - and indeed the past 13 months - rolls around.

When markets are generally overvalued cash is our default and represents an eminently sensible active investment idea in the fund.

Upon closer investigation all is not well with offshore stocks. Our work clearly shows the growing discrepancy over the past 6 months between the positive 5.8% return (in US Dollars) of the MSCI World Index and the minus 5.4% return of the average global stock in our database of over 12,000 global companies. This is particularly noticeable in smaller companies, which declined by a sobering 11%. This week we invested in our first directly listed offshore business, but in global markets investments that meet our criteria remain few and far between at this time.

Our portfolio strategy remains to safely get us all to the point where the fund will be fully invested in a diversified selection of quality understandable businesses led by trustworthy people priced for delivering attractive future growth; with at best more money than you invested alongside us and our families, and at worst flat to only slightly down in a market meltdown scenario when many others would have lost serious money and may quite possibly be tempted to panic.

Our work continues...