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Articles by Rob Perrone
ROB PERRONE: Sticks, carrots and financial repression
Small towns built around a single industry risk economic decline unless national policies are better aligned with local realities
ROB PERRONE | Sticks, carrots and financial repression
Say you’re an economic policymaker — a president, finance minister or central banker. Decades of budget deficits have left your country with a growing debt problem, and markets are starting to sniff it out. What do you do about it? You have to do something. If you do nothing and markets call time on your debt problem, your days as a policymaker are numbered.
Great expectations - raising the bar
Markets are a race between fundamentals and expectations. When fundamentals get ahead, expectations have to catch up and prices follow. But when expectations get ahead, it's a different story. Fundamentals can't just run faster or jump higher. So it's expectations that need to take a knock, dragging share prices down with them. Rob Perrone from our offshore partner, Orbis, explains this relationship in this 7-minute video.
Truly diversifying your portfolio for Offshore Returns
Given the stellar rise in the S&P 500 in the past decade, it is understandable that many investors still hold high expectations for US stocks. But shifting gear to low expectations – and truly diversifying your portfolio – is a better strategy for investors seeking to earn offshore returns at a time of heightened geopolitical risk, argues Rob Perrone, senior investment specialist at Orbis, Allan Gray’s offshore investment partner.
Investing offshore: Dependent on Great Expectations?
After years of strong returns from US equities, the road ahead looks less certain. The question long-term offshore investors should be asking now isn’t just what worked in the past — but what’s priced to work in the future. According to Orbis, Allan Gray’s offshore investment partner, the most compelling opportunities may lie where expectations are lowest. Given the stellar rise in the S&P 500 in the past decade, it is understandable that many investors still hold high expectations for US stocks.
Orbis Global Balanced: Defensively positioned to deliver long-term returns
The Orbis SICAV Global Balanced Fund remains cautiously positioned with severe underweight exposure to the US dollar compared to its benchmark. Alec Cutler and Rob Perrone from our offshore partner, Orbis, discuss how the landscape is evolving and how Orbis is thinking about the portfolio. This commentary was compiled at quarter-end (31 March 2025). Uncertainty is the order of the day in the US, and that is not what markets were expecting in January.
DOGE: When do great expectations become a risk?
Over the last 15 years, the US stockmarket has come to dominate global passive portfolios, with its weight in the MSCI World Index rising from below 50% to nearly 75%. That ascent was driven by exceptional returns. Since 2010, the S&P 500 has returned 13.8% per annum — much higher than markets elsewhere, exceptionally high versus its own history and inflation, and a near-record result against bonds and cash.
HMC Capital looks to mirror healthcare sector success with property focus in 2024
When news broke that HMC Capital engineered the merger of portfolio company Sigma Healthcare with distributer Chemist Warehouse Group in December, it was touted as the biggest M&A story of the year and sparked a ~50 per cent increase in the Sigma stock price.
The dangers of being too passive
2022 was the worst year for stocks since the global financial crisis, and the worst year for bonds in living memory. After the pain of 2022, it is comforting to believe that the hard times are over, and that a boom in artificial intelligence will drive the market higher, with investors rescued by the so-called “magnificent seven” US tech giants. Hope is seductive, but markets conspire to cause the greatest pain to the greatest number of investors. Today we see enormous scope for potential pain.
Securitisation stays strong through market turmoil, propped by non-bank lending growth
The domestic asset-backed securities (ABS) market has evolved into a critical source of funding in Australian capital markets, helping underserved borrowers while offering an increasingly diverse investment proposition. Importantly, it has also proven resilient to challenging financial conditions, largely supported by the growing non-bank lending sector.
Orbis: Cash flow is underrated
Value stocks have suffered a long period of being out of favour. Having thrived for nearly a century, value has lagged growth stocks since the global financial crisis, suffering the deepest and longest drawdown in its history. But times change. That underperformance has left value stocks trading at exceptionally attractive prices in relative terms, even after a good year in 2022.
The future of value
Value has suffered a long period of being out of favour. Having thrived for nearly a century, value has lagged since the global financial crisis, suffering the deepest and longest drawdown in its history. But times change. That underperformance has left value stocks trading at exceptionally attractive prices, even after a good year in 2022.
Advisers want one thing above all else from their fund managers: Report
While the process involved in selecting a fund manager inherently involves a number of factors, the primary concern for financial advisers isn’t necessarily past performance or fees according to a new report from research firm Investment Trends. Instead, the 2023 Adviser product and marketing needs report explains, advisers want to know how a product provider thinks and the reasoning behind their investment logic.
Blood, booms and 'barefoot millionaires': The Anthony Menico story
For Anthony Menico, financial advice was in his blood whether he knew it or not. Growing up as the son of John Menico OAM, a legend in the Cairns area as both a financial adviser and a community volunteer, the younger Menico was destined for a place in the finance industry, but he didn’t quite know exactly in what role.
ROB PERRONE: Winning the AI race: the battle between logic and memory
We don’t know who is going to win the artificial intelligence (AI) race, which is why we are betting on the components. Everyone is going to need semiconductors in the production of AI. Semiconductors are split into logic and memory. Logic chips, the brains of a computer, are specialised. Some are good for phones, some for servers, some for AI, and much of the value is in the design — Nvidia, which designs chips made by others, recently touched $1-trillion in market value.
Memory: Industry cycles, not the business cycle
Rob Perrone, a member of the team of Investment Counsellors at our offshore partner, Orbis, explores the case for investing in the memory semiconductor industry. The financial press spills oceans of ink on the short-term business cycle of interest rates and recessions. Yet predicting that cycle is difficult. It is noisy, and the competition is crowded.
The link between interest rates and inflation
The economy is running hot – but so is inflation A central bank is a bank for banks, where commercial banks have their bank accounts. Just as you or I might have a current account at HSBC, HSBC would have its current account – a reserve account – at the Bank of England (BoE). Those reserves can earn interest, and central banks set the rate they pay on commercial banks’ reserve balances. Many central banks, including the BoE, use the interest rate on reserve balances as their official policy rate.
The link between interest rates and inflation
The economy is running hot – but so is inflation A central bank is a bank for banks, where commercial banks have their bank accounts. Just as you or I might have a current account at HSBC, HSBC would have its current account – a reserve account – at the Bank of England (BoE). Those reserves can earn interest, and central banks set the rate they pay on commercial banks’ reserve balances. Many central banks, including the BoE, use the interest rate on reserve balances as their official policy rate.
ROB PERRONE: There is a fine line between accelerating and slowing inflation
Markets seem a bit too relaxed about the risk of higher or more persistent inflation. We have no edge in forecasting inflation, and big macro questions are not the starting point for our decisions. Macro forces are influenced by a dizzying number of noisy variables, and big questions attract droves of smart people trying to find the answers, making it fiendishly difficult to be different and right.
The 60/40: a castle made of sand?
It is a curious time for the US economy. The federal government is running its biggest deficits since World War II. Economic growth is set to exceed 5%. For the first time in a decade, inflation has breached 4%. Parts of the labour market look exceptionally tight. Stockmarkets are at record highs. And the Federal Reserve’s last action on interest rates was to cut.
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