SIMON BROWN: I’m chatting with Luigi Marinus, portfolio manager at PPS Investments. Luigi, appreciate the time today. Looking back at your first quarter, to my sense, I suppose three themes.
So I don’t know if that’s just scaring the market, but I don’t think it will be very positive for markets. I think we were equally surprised by how strongly the tech counters continued to perform. They do look quite expensive, but sometimes momentum is quite strong in equity markets – and we see that continuing. So we would never say that you should not have any exposure, even to some expensive asset classes.
But we remain confident that at some point that’s going to change, so we still have some South African exposure in portfolios, but we have some emerging market exposure in portfolios as well. SIMON BROWN: You mentioned asset classes – and of course bonds have been one of the huge beneficiaries of rising interest rates the world over high inflation. Bonds really have had their day in the sun.
Last year in the US, for example, we saw the US 10-year get close to 5%, which we haven’t seen in many years. We actually started out holding some US bonds for the first time that I can recall in our portfolios, and the portfolios have definitely benefitted from that as well. We talked about emerging markets up front. Of course South Africa is an emerging market. The big emerging market is China. It’s looking better. Equities are still trailing.