Macro investments evolve around probability, bets on economic trends such as GDP growth, money supply, inflation, and around timing.
Brun Lubert believes investors and their advisors need to stay on the ground long enough to understand the bearings of markets. In addition to our quantitative analysis and macro research, we decided decades ago to work on location, and on a real-time and first-hand basis, effectively moving our “on-the-ground presence” to emerging industries and economies.
One has to source local facts, seek exposure to the cities, factories, institutions, corporations, shareholders, government officials, and languages of markets. In other words, one has to meet with real people, and with trailblazers and inventions that have the potential to become symbols of social progress. It has remained the basis for our investment decisions, our research, deal originating, asset structuring, and portfolio building. Financial markets data, and radical analytical discipline are an integral part of our approach, as is the assembling of conflicting data into one comprehensive ledger. Eighteenth century Chinese intellectuals, who conducted avant-la-lettre empirical research in the humanities, called the approach “Kaozheng”, or evidential research. It brought, in earlier times, methodical, rigorous approaches to fields such as mathematics and geography, consistently developing rules for assessing evidence and creating progress.
