M&G Investments’ Post

Transcript

My name is George Rose and I'm an equities investment specialist here at M&G. I'm delighted to be joined by David Perrett, Co head of our Pan Asian Equity team. Hi, Dave. Hey, George. I wanna talk with you in this video a little bit about ideas coming from your research. Now clearly to be differentiated and to try and ensure a good outcomes for your investors, you need to be doing something different to your peers. How do you do this? Great question, George. You know I think this is where the universe investment universe we've curated over time really comes into its own. Now if I were to try and build a straw person of a competitor of ours. Be someone who reads somewhere or comes up with an idea from research somewhere else and then you go to try and prove the null hypothesis that they have. In their mind, now, there's no wrong about approach, and for some people it works. But from our perspective, it's slightly flawed in the sense that we already have something they're trying to prove. And so in that sense, the research may be somewhat colored. The universe we meet, the stocks in our universe anywhere between 5:00 to to 1 * a year to go out where they are, but we meet them regularly. We're always trying to understand the business better, get a superior perspective. And oftentimes what we find just talking to the companies, we find new information. Which actually relevant to potential investment idea, but the point is it's come from talking to the companies, it may be something they're doing was different. We've talked to them five times in the previous three years and then suddenly they mentioned something different in terms of maybe pricing. It may be that they've competitors are doing something different. They're customers, they're suppliers. A point being, we have this universe and we're always finding new information out untainted, pure new information. Fantastic. You spoke about a few examples within there, but do you think you could expand on some more, some some other things you hear when you're talking to companies? Yeah, I'll give you a couple of examples. India is a market where we follow closely and we have some excellent expertise in, in the team we were talking to. A number of the finance companies there in particular support mortgage growth and for a while the mortgage industry has been going through some tougher times in India. Even prior to COVID and after COVID, but then talking to his companies, we got a sense for actually underlying demand in the economy for housing was exceptionally strong. So that was a good thing for us in one sense because we already had some exposed to these companies on the mortgage side. But it made us go looking to try and find interesting names that perhaps would benefit from stronger housing demand per se and we had some considerable success in that regard. Another example might be we were talking to a shipping company. Now the gold standard of shipbuilders who supply this shipping companies are mostly based in Korea. Now we heard that some of these companies from a shipping company were having trouble meeting the time slots they required to meet customer needs. Is interesting for us. That was the first time we ever heard that we checked around the industry. We also talked to some experts, had it confirmed and I had some very important implications for their competitors because that would mean that perhaps people would normally always go to those companies, might be looking for other suppliers and in fact that's what played out. Just an example where you hear some bits of information, but because you got that context within the universe and similar stocks, you can connect the dots and make value for our add value for our customers and clients. That's fantastic, Dave. Thanks very much. Pleasure.