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Paul Gambles

Recognized as a regional financial expert, Paul is a regular speaker at industry events on market forecasting, financial planning, investing and legal issues for foreigners living or doing business in Asia.  Besides Paul’s blog, Paul previously distributed his ‘almost-daily’ email – “Daily Updates”, where he gave his views on timely issues affecting financial markets, macro economics, micro economics and everything in-between.

Born in South Yorkshire, England, Paul graduated from the University of Warwick with an Honours degree in English and European Studies.  He began his financial career in the early 1980s as a technical inspector at HMIT with Inland Revenue.  Following a successful career change to the Bank of Scotland in 1987, Paul moved to Bangkok in 1994 to help set-up an investment counseling practice, which today is known as MBMG International.

www.mbmg-international.com

  

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4 October 2011

Golden Bulls!

Congratulations to our affiliated portfolio managers, MitonOptimal, the specialist global multi asset management company with a presence in Guernsey, South Africa and Asia who recently announced the launch of its institutional asset consulting business.  MitonOptimal has an impressive 15 year track record of global multi asset management in very adverse conditions and has worked closely with MBMG since its inception.Part of their expansion saw the appointment of Professor Evan Gilbert as a director and Head of Institutional Asset Consulting from 1 September. Prof Gilbert joined from Cadiz Asset Management and was formerly at UCT and the University of Stellenbosch. Having completed his Ph.D at the Cambridge, he has a wealth of experience in asset allocation research, trustee training and has written many academic papers on portfolio management and related subjects."I am very excited about joining Scott, Roeloff, Joanne, Cherie-Lee and the rest of the team at MitonOptimal. They are an asset allocation specialist and have a partnership culture with a real desire to produce investment results in all aspects of their portfolio management. I strongly believe that the value proposition of active asset allocation and implemented consulting, combined with multi management, can only continue to gain immense traction in the local market" added Prof Gilbert.Scott Campbell, Managing Director and fund manager at MitonOptimal added "since we founded this business we have believed that the value proposition in portfolio management is global diversification and the ability to add asset allocation alpha by tactical decision making and timeous implementation. The team led by Prof Gilbert and ourselves has the pedigree and enthusiasm to create a new force in the South African Institutional industry. Asset Allocation is shown by academic research to attribute 90% of variance in portfolio returns and our experience to date with institutional schemes is that they do not diversify this most important decision. The real risk faced by trustees is not moving to multi manager, but not having any diversification of consultant. Overemphasis has been given to actuarial static asset allocation and manager search which is the remaining 10% of risk attribution. The US implemented asset consulting market has grown to US$200bn since 2004 and the local industry is also changing quickly. Balanced multi asset managers are the best placed to deliver forward focused performance in the future."Scott was recently in Bangkok to celebrate MBMG’s 15th anniversary celebrations at which he shocked his audience by announcing that his almost decade long love affair with gold is coming to an end. “There’s still upside but maybe another 10% or 20% or so, perhaps a bit more. But really that’s just nickels in front of bulldozers when gold has already been an 8–bagger since we first bought in at around $250 per ounce”.  Sadly, all good things come to an end that will include gold’s bull-run. Gold could then be expected to cyclically languish for the next 30-40 years at as much as 75% below today’s levels.