Kooyman wins top global award again
Investment fundi lauded in London
VETERAN investment expert Kokkie Kooyman, head of Sanlam Investment Management Global, was this week named Investment Week’s international fund manager of the year for financial investments at London’s Royal Albert Hall.
This is the fourth year running he has grabbed the award, which highlights funds that perform consistently — and signals that the judges feel the fund manager will not disappoint in the future.
Speaking from London, Kooyman told Business Times that the award came as a surprise as competition had increased since last year.
“It’s a hard slog every time. We can actually model how we’re doing against our competition, and in the last three months we could see we were slipping. However, [the jury use] subjective criteria, such as scrutinising the portfolio to see if the performance is sustainable and not based on a few underlying shares. I think that’s where we came through,” he said.
The awards are prestigious, but Kooyman said his firm had not seen an increase in inflows as a result.
“Although we’ve had a few inquiries from some foreign managers, there hasn’t been a massive upturn in inflows. I think it’s a reflection of how cautious managers are in these uncertain times, but I’m positive this will change soon,” he said.
Kooyman’s award was for his performance at a time of weak emerging markets. For the year to this July, the benchmark for emerging market companies, the MSCI Emerging Markets Index, returned a negative 1.14%.
According to Kooyman, the recent sell-off in emerging markets and South Africa in particular has been overdone, and there are juicy bargains on his radar.
“Although all emerging markets have done poorly over the past year, South Africa has done marginally worse,” he said.
“The local market will only turn when the rest of the emerging markets do.
“There are two key risks to this recovery, however — the possibility of the Chinese economy slowing even further and the possibility of US interest rates rising faster than expected.”
Regardless of a general weakness in emerging markets, Kooyman continues to back financial firms from these regions.
“Despite being generally smaller companies, they’ve performed really well.
“One firm was from India, two are from Thailand, one was in Georgia of all places, another in Turkey, and we had two companies from the UK and US each.”