10 Years, Not Out…
On this day 10 years ago (28 October 2011); the first flow of client funds vested into our (at the time) newly-minted Moderate Discretionary Savings portfolio.
A 10 year track record is an important milestone for a fund manager in South Africa. It is a sign of longevity; a means for measuring legitimacy; proof of a workable investment philosophy and methodologies, and carries an underlying message of a battle-hardened wealth manager.
Sunstrike Capital – trading as ‘Index Solutions’ – began it’s formal foray into the investment management space, with hope of creating index-based segregated portfolio models that offered broader retail investment appeal.
Starting off as the internal fund manager for the Itransact platform and broader AOS Group; the next 9 years would be spent building a set of equally robust and flexible retail investment models that would span across discretionary and prudential offerings … Local and international markets would be accessible to a burgeoning investor base seeking a low-cost & “no-frills” investment vehicle.
The journey has been an eventful one. In very much the same way it mimics the local and international markets, in that they have their bullish moments interspersed with achingly slow bears. Our vision has always been to deliver the market “warts and all”, while applying statistical and quantitative methodologies in reducing the falls, but augmenting the highs.
The basis for our investment philosophy lies in the use of machine learning (ML) and artificial narrow intelligence (ANI) as a basis for the underlying instrument selection mechanism that we apply to our asset allocations. Through these powerful 4IR tools, we have been able to workably remove the intrinsic biases that are prevalent in asset allocations across active fund managers in the industry. The idea behind this is to remove the biases that creep up on traditional portfolio managers when selecting underlying instruments for their portfolio models.
By using ETFs as a basis for our portfolio models, the ease of use, cost and broader market- & asset class – access is available from initial investment.
We have been able to build low-cost investment products with low hurdles to entry. Starting with a debit order of R300 or R5000 lump sum.
Our 10th year has seen possibly the most movement yet. We are in the process of expanding our institutional offerings, increasing the availability of our products on more than one platform, and the recent creation of a new structured note product that makes use of the same portfolio building principles that we have applied to our existing portfolio models, in order to build a composite international index fuelled and powered by ETFs.
3600+ clients…
10 Portfolio models…
R400million+ in retail assets under management…
A 10 year track record…
There’s definitely more to come on the horizon. In the words of Frank Sinatra: “The best is yet to come…”
Here’s to another 10 years of growth and wealth creation for our investors