If you have come to these pages in hope of reading up on a fund manager’s ideas on how the Trump effect and Brexit might hit returns, then you have come to wrong place. It is the micro, not macro, that Ben Preston of Orbis Investments is interested in.
As a manager overseeing the global equities team at Orbis Investments, Ben Preston is a staunch bottom-up stock picker more likely to be found discussing company level microeconomics than the Trump’s latest tweet or the impact of Bank of England policy on the FTSE 100.
The focus of the Orbis Global Equity Fund, which is more than £16bn in size, is on finding companies with long-term value, an area where examining the macro can muddle decision-making according to Preston.
This long-term aspect of working within the Orbis team, which he joined in 2000, is clearly something Preston has been proud to be a part of during his 17 years with the firm.
“I find it easier to express through what we don’t do, it can help to cut through a lot of the complexities,” he says.
“So, what we don’t do is try to predict interest rates, inflation rates, GDP growth, all those macroeconomic variables which occupy a lot of time in investors’ minds.”
“Really, investing is not about the prediction of countries economic success. If you run a correlation of investment returns against GDP growth, there isn’t a correlation, so the enormous amount of attention that is given to predicting GDP growth and so forth is of very little consequence to the investor.
“We just don’t think it’s worth a lot of time.”
