Our Unique Position Among Asset Management Firms in Dubai
Our company was founded by investment professionals coming from the world of asset management, the umbrella industry under which the investment management and portfolio management industries exist.
The origin of our team’s experience has been investing through economic cycles in major Western and Eastern listed markets. In addition, over the course of decades our team cumulated meaningful exposure to private and real estate markets.
As students of history, a lot of time and resources have been devoted internally to the historical analysis of returns across asset classes. This work equips us with a long-term view of where exactly we are at any given moment, and what investment opportunities should not be missed.
This expertise is unique in the asset management industry in Dubai and in the UAE.
The capability to capture opportunities across asset classes is also rare because asset management companies in the DIFC or in the UAE and in major Western jurisdictions tend to be hyper-focused on a single asset class, if not a single industry or geography.
Our independence of thought renders us capable of providing wide and diversified portfolio management services that very few other companies in the UAE can match.
The Investment Philosophy Behind Our Portfolio Management Services
The school of thought that inspires our portfolio management is our own version of Value Investing.
Originally, Value Investing was designed to profit from a mismatch of economic value and market price on any given company. We found that we agreed with the principles of fundamental research, but not with the target on any given company.
Our focus is high quality companies, not any given company. In other words, we want to own part of businesses that excel in a few fundamental and proprietary metrics through which we define quality, and they do that over the course of years if not decades.
The tenets of our approach are macroeconomic research or top-down, fundamental research or bottom-up and quantitative tactic adjustments via algorithms.
Macroeconomic Research
We begin with a view of the economic world. All industries live through cycles, some shorter, some longer. It is in those cycles that investment opportunities lie in waiting for us to pick.
Occasionally, interest rate cycles and other government policies produce industrial shifts that uncover investment opportunities. These instances are rare, such as the 2022-2024 FED rate cycle, and they can gift us very appealing returns.
We tend to not stick on any particular academic macroeconomic model simply because factual evidence tends to disprove the majority of them. Our approach is pragmatic, long-term oriented and essential.
The result of this type of research is the identification of trends of any nature in the industries of our interest.
Fundamental Research
As we identify favourable industrial trends, the identification of excellence begins.
Many industries do not give the chance of concentration or domination. This makes for a fragmented industrial background where company excels over others, and therefore achieves nothing worthy of notice.
We mostly look at concentrated industries where a few incumbents dominate the landscape. It would be ideal for these companies to be entrenched in their position and possibly stable in their economic results and growth.
When such companies are identified it is time to deep dive into them. Going through the books is essential, but not sufficient. Interviewing industry experts and participants provides ultimate understanding of the company and industry alike.
The search for quality is never-ending and seldom results in finding pearls in the mud. This fact makes fundamental research more rare than macroeconomic research, as our deep dives take an enormous amount of resources.
Quantitative Tactics
Over the years we noticed that markets were giving repeating trend signals. This is not surprising, as trend signals are really only following earning cycles.
What is surprising and can be confusing is that signals became stronger and markets became faster over the course of the last 15 years. A more intense deployment of so-called CTAs (computer trading algorithms) is likely the main culprit here, and it is anyway well known that CTAs have played an increasingly more important part in dictating market direction and speed in current times.
Our take on this topic is that it would not be intelligent to leave extra-returns on the table by not utilizing some signal. Therefore, we have designed a number of algorithms that help us identify instances of overbought and oversold conditions in any given asset. We build these tools with protection in mind more than speculation.
These tools are stratified, complex mathematical constructions that can produce over time a vast markups in portfolio returns on top of the simple buy-and-hold strategy, based on the protective feature they are built around.