Going against the grain and opting for investments others might steer away from does make the job of categorising the fund all the harder, a point that raises a proud smile from Preston.
“We have had investment consultants look at us, look at our history and the shares we have held and said ‘we don’t know how to characterise you as an investment manager’. They say sometimes you’re large cap, sometimes you’re mid cap, sometimes you’re growth, sometimes you’re value and we say, yes, we’re contrarian.
“If everybody else has gone for growth we will go for value, if everybody else goes for large cap we’ll go for mid cap. It’s not that we will see where everyone has gone and deliberately go the other way, we just see the opportunities in that area so the portfolio drifts to the areas with best returns.”
An important part of this contrarian stance is in the way the Orbis equity team is set up, with no single manager holding overall responsibility for the fund’s performance, instead, each of the fund’s six portfolio managers is held individually responsible for the stocks they decide to buy.
Four regional teams cover analysis of company environments in the US, Europe, Japan and emerging markets, while further sector teams are broken down with a focus on the likes of financials or healthcare.
It gives a “wide view” for investment decisions Preston says, with the firm’s CIO William Gray acting only to oversee the process, not the stock-picking itself.
