In February the average prudential balanced portfolio returned 0.50% (Jan: -2.08%). Top performer is Allan Gray (1.76%); while Prudential (-0.29%) takes the bottom spot. For the 3 month period Allan Gray, for the 7th consecutive month takes top spot, outperforming the ‘average’ by roughly 6.4%. On the other end of the scale EMH Prescient underperformed the ‘average’ by 3.3%.

Beware of stepping on the wrong toes

In the years after the financial crisis, when the Fed introduced its large scale asset purchase programme and reduced its repo to 0.25%, when commodities and the oil price were running hot things were going extremely well with many resource driven emerging economies and with oil producing countries. Their interest rates were low, their currencies and bourses appreciated substantially driven by foreign investors looking for yield. Those were the days when many of these countries started to think about how to break the shackles of the global hegemon. There were moves to trade crude in currencies other than the US Dollar in an effort to break the US Dollar monopoly. We read about the BRICS countries having resolved to establish a BRICS Bank in order to break the shackles of the IMF and World Bank.

A number of oil exporting countries that became more outspoken on their anti US sentiments experienced civil uprisings, some experienced regime changes and with the dramatic fall of the oil price, those regimes that survived are at last also experiencing severe economic problems.