A quick chart reading test to start with. Look at the chart below, what can you see ?

A- A forming Bullish doji-hammer-death-black-star pattern
B- A sunset on the sea side
C- The latest drawing of my 2-year-old daughter
D - Alpha






The correct answer is “D” : this is the price of St. James’s Place Far East equity fund (SJPFARA LN) investing on Asian (incl. Japan) stock markets and where I switched early this year most (more than 2 thirds) of my long equity bucket, diversification is for the birds and Sauros is not able to fly (yet, still working on it...). We can observe it’s currently outperforming the markets as it recovered back to January’s top while most of the stock markets (including the FTSE Asia-Pacific index its benchmark) are 4-5% below as I write.


As I explained in a previous post, since early 2009 I’ve been building back a long stock position after I went to cash in early 2008, a few weeks before SocGen’s rogue trader story, thanks to the Lord of Trading… My core long stock position is though mutual funds as I don’t know a thing about stock picking, particularly on Asian names (I’m not sure I’m able to list 10 names there). I delegated the task of picking stocks and try to pick the right managers instead. What I want is Alpha and Alpha mainly. Let me explain why: because I try to time the market at the same time and thus happen to be long Alpha only .

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