David’s role encompasses the research, development and implementation of Bellwood Capital’s equity investment strategies, proprietary models and systems.
Socially responsible investing (SRI) continues to gather momentum in the investment industry, and is becoming increasingly popular amongst private investors. The idea is that investors allocate their capital to socially responsible businesses. There is some subjectivity as to what constitutes social responsibility, though ESG scoring (environmental, social, governance) is one widely accepted approach. Consideration can […]
NetEnt and Evolution Gaming have been two of our most successful investments to date. Both are Swedish companies operating in the online gaming industry (i.e. casino/betting systems). Since we acquired them through 2018/19, they have returned 120% and 370% respectively. As of March however, the performance of these two stocks couldn’t have been more divergent. […]
At Bellwood, we follow a quantitative process that ignores popular narratives and makes decisions based on underlying fundamentals like profitability, financial strength and valuation. One of the things that differentiates us from other quants-oriented asset managers is that we subject our portfolios to a more qualitative ‘red flags analysis’ before implementation. So the numbers always […]
What a quarter it has been. COVID-19 has abruptly reminded us of the many frailties in our global society. The world seems almost paralyzed by the shock. As bad as the reaction in financial markets has been, it pales in comparison to the magnitude of the real economic pain this virus is causing across the […]
Last quarter we wrote about active share and how our portfolios are very different from the index. The strength (both relative and absolute) that we saw in September continued through the end of the year, as our portfolios rose 13.1% in aggregate during the last quarter, bringing our total net USD return for 2019 to […]
We sold out of our position in Apple in the 4th quarter of 2019. We bought most of our shares in 2016 between $90 and $120 for a total return of roughly 140% in just over 3 years. While Apple has been a phenomenal investment for us, and it remains an excellent business by our […]
Investment managers are generally split into two categories: Active and passive. Active managers aim to outperform a certain benchmark index by being different from it. Passive investors seek to replicate an index. Both have their proponents and their detractors. Recently there has been a strong trend towards passive investment following a number of studies which […]
The conventional wisdom in investing is that more information is better than less. In the past Peter and I have sometimes questioned whether we have an informational deficit, but over time we’ve realized that it is not quantity of information that counts, but knowing which information is important and analyzing it correctly. In fact, to […]
AfrAsia’s latest South Africa Wealth Report found that wealthy South Africans have 83% of their assets invested locally. According to the report, their asset class breakdown between South Africa and the rest of the world is: Let’s exclude properties, businesses and alternatives, which tend to be illiquid and might correlate with where you live or […]
Return = Yield + Growth + Revaluation = Sustainable Return + Revaluation This understanding of return is central to our investment philosophy and process. We’ve written about this on numerous occasions. Those who have followed our writing will recall that revaluation, though dominant in the short-term, tends to cancel itself out over long periods of […]