Rowan Williams-Short, head of fixed-income at Vunani Fund Managers, was my special guest on the Investment Community podcast. You can listen to the conversation with Rowan here.

In this episode (part 1 of 3), Rowan tells:

  • How he naturally understood probabilities as a kid playing board games with dice, and how his maths and stats training honed his ability to deal with more complex probability problems.
  • How most market participants are unable to think probabilistically, and how that creates investment opportunities.
  • How he developed deep respect for unknowns in the securities markets, and how that informs his philosophy of inference.

We also discussed:

  • The folly of making point-forecasts of company earnings without including confidence intervals.
  • That SA equity investors for the last decade have had to get only two big calls right: Naspers/Prosus and the platinum stocks.
  • That investment excellence is undermined by a focus on asset-gathering, and that maintenance-research is a poor utilisation of expensive resources.