Founded in 1901 and now wholly owned by the Prudential, the UK’s largest life assurance company, M&G Investments is one of the UK’s largest and longest established investment houses with more than 80 years’ experience and some $400 billion in AUM. Dave Fishwick’s Macro & Multi Asset Investment team has managed a macro strategy for its parent company since 1999. The strategy has
returned 10.4% gross per annum since 2001. As of March 2015 Dave and his team manage $1.2 billion for institutional clients, $4.8 billion in retail funds. He and his team are able to do fully independent research and investments while having access to and support of the wider Prudential and M&G infrastructure and resources.
Although Dave and his team are trained economists, the strategy is based on exploiting emotional (behavioural) biases in the pricing of risk rather than on forecasts or views. Dave believes the typical approach of managing money based on economic forecasting fails because it does not consider the "emotional aspects of owning assets". A lot of market volatility is not explainable by fundamentals. Today, investors should strive to understand the "emotional journey" of markets, as it is more about what markets "feel" than what they "know". And indeed, Fishwick and his team have demonstrated over the past 15 years that a strategy with a "superior emotional intelligence" can also offer superior returns.
The strategy is based on a valuation framework and repeatable research & investment process that is applicable to most liquid asset classes. Isolating situations where prices move for non-fundamental reasons, their trades are often contrarian and can be "deeply unsettling" because they can go head on against the herd and against the current trend. The essence of the strategy is to "take on and engage with market stress, rather than avoid it".
In this Opalesque BACKSTAGE video, you can also learn about:- The critical role of human emotion in price determination
- How has Fishwick’s strategy held up in different market environments since 2001?
- Risk management: Going beyond "stop loss culture"
- Is volatility risk?
Dave Fishwick heads up the Macro and Multi Asset Investment Business at M&G Investments and is co-fund manager of the M&G Episode Macro Fund. Dave has more than 25 years’ of investment management experience, having joined Prudential Portfolio Managers (now M&G Investments) in 1987 as a European economist and subsequently being responsible for forming views on global bond and currency markets and applying them to multi-asset funds.
In 1994, Dave relocated to Australia where he was appointed head of fixed interest and asset allocation strategy in 1997. During that time, he developed his ideas on market behaviour and designed the strategy, philosophy and process implemented for an overlay mandate for the Prudential Life Fund upon his return to Europe in 1999. In light of the success of this mandate, an offshore fund was launched in 2005, and the M&G Episode Macro Fund (UCITS) was launched in 2010, both following the same strategy. Dave has a BSc in economics from Brunel University, London.
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Founded in 1901 and now wholly owned by the Prudential, the UK’s largest life assurance company, M&G Investments is one of the UK’s largest and longest established investment houses with more than 80 years’ experience and some $400 billion in AUM. Dave Fishwick’s Macro & Multi Asset Investment team has managed a macro strategy for its parent company since 1999. The strategy has
returned 10.4% gross per annum since 2001. As of March 2015 Dave and his team manage $1.2 billion for institutional clients, $4.8 billion in retail funds. He and his
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