Juggling Hand Grenades with Duncan MacInnes of The Ruffer Investment Company

For this episode, I am joined by Duncan MacInnes, manager of The Ruffer Investment Company, for a conversation about his investment philosophy and how he thinks about risk in today’s financial markets. 

He describes himself as a pragmatic, macro-informed, value investor.  

The Ruffer Investment Company is a billion-pound London-listed investment company with the simple aim of delivering consistent positive returns regardless of how financial markets perform with the ambition to protect and increase the real value of its investor's capital. 

A simple but challenging mandate. 

To achieve this distinctive objective, Duncan has a highly differentiated strategy and has constructed a portfolio that looks nothing like most portfolios. 

Since its launch in the early 2000s, Ruffer has had a good long-term track record. 

However, over the last couple of years, performance has slipped as risk assets, particularly equities, have outperformed Duncan’s expectations.   

But Ruffer’s performance has a tendency, as Duncan says, to perform like ketchup coming out of a glass bottle. 

The events of early August, as the yen carry trade sent markets in a spin, offered a brief glimpse of the better times that might lie ahead for this fund. 

Duncan offers a master class in different, often esoteric, markets and how he has used instruments such as gold, FX, credit spreads, derivatives, inflation-linked bonds and even bitcoin to find uncorrelated returns and asymmetric and reflexive risk profiles. 

Duncan is positive on the outlook for gold, the yen, and commodities. However, he thinks investors are over their skis regarding US equities, specifically the Mag Seven. 

He is more positive about UK equities and describes why the consensual view that Chinese equities are uninvestable draws him to them. 

As he says, we are all invested in China already, but at several times the value of most Chinese stocks.

As always, nothing you hear in this podcast is investment advice, and all the views expressed by the contributors are in a personal capacity only and do not represent the views of Progressive Equity or any other organization mentioned in this podcast.       

Please enjoy my conversation with the maverick, Duncan MacInnes.