I am an investment professional living and working in Johannesburg, South Africa.
I studied Actuarial Science and Mathematical Statistics (Bachelor of Science) at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in the late eighties and early nineties, before beginning my first job at Glenvaal (later Glenvaal Dewar Rand, Glenrand, and Glenrand MIB) in Braamfontein and then Sandton, and finally Randburg. I then moved into IT, starting an IT business (WebSoft, and later WebSoft Maven) with a couple of smart and like-minded individuals.
In the early naughties, I read for a Masters of Business Administration (MBA) at Wits Business School, and graduated in 2006. In 2005 (while busy with the MBA) I started studying full-time for the next fifteen months, as I picked up from where I left off my actuarial studies. I also enrolled in the CFA program with the CFA Institute, as well as their CIPM program. By the end of 2007, I had qualified as an Actuary through the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries in the UK and the Actuarial Society of South Africa, and was a CFA Charterholder, and about a year later also held the CIPM and CAIA designations (CFA Institute and CAIA Association respectively).
Towards the end of 2006, I re-entered the workforce, taking a position as an Asset Consultant at Alexander Forbes, and spent the next five years consulting to some of South Africa’s largest pension funds, medical aids, short term insurers and sovereign wealth funds. At the beginning of 2012, I moved to STANLIB Multi-Manager as the Chief Investment Officer (CIO), although I also play the role of the Chief Information Officer (joke) because of my IT background and passion. STANLIB Multi-Manager is one of the largest multi-managers in South Africa by assets under management and advice (we don’t do administration). What makes me happiest and proudest though, is our enviable performance track record, which has translated into wealth creation for our investors.
For fun, I like to code. Everything from developing apps for mobile devices (see the pages on this website or the Apple App Store), to creating technical investment related applications for my work. Although Investments is my passion and my career, coding is my first love and I have never been able to spend any time away from it. I started coding when I got my first computer (Commodore 64) when I was twelve, and have been hooked ever since. Over the years, I have coded in too many different languages to remember, but have never stopped learning. The Internet has made learning easy and fun, and there aren’t enough hours in the day to get bored. More recently I have developed Investment related applications integrating Qlikview and R (Qlikview being a powerful BI system, and R the open source statistical application), and even more recently, I have started porting to Python and learning machine learning, including writing my own algorithms. For fun, I have learned Objective C and then Swift to develop iOS apps for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Apple TV, and MacOS apps for the Apple Mac. I’m currently relearning Javascript and developing some interesting web applications (watch this space).
Although my intention was always to make this my profession, the appeal of Maths and Stats in Actuarial Science was too great to not explore. I am at my core a multi-specialist, preferring to learn as much as I can about as many different topics as pique my interest, than specializing in a single field. I love science in general, and astronomy, philosophy and technology specifically. I’m most interested in the intersection of various fields (e.g. bio-tech). I love to read (technically, listening to audiobooks as who has time to read), and get through thirty to fifty books per year across both fiction and non-fiction. I also love listening to podcasts in areas I’m interested in, and watching YouTube videos.