Meeting Lourens Coetzee, Investment Professional, Marriott Asset Management

  • Q: How did you get involved in financial services - was it always something you wanted to do?
  • A: Originally I wanted to be an actuary and designed my studies around subjects that would prepare me best for the qualifying exams. This meant that I focused on mathematics and economics, with an interest in computer science. which really gave me a good foundation to enter the financial services industry. After completing a couple of internships, I realised that I had a passion for asset management and financial analysis specifically. I started working for a brokerage firm doing client portfolio admin, moved into a consulting role for an asset manager and ultimately joined the Marriott investment team.

  • Q: You have the wonderful word “mathematics” in your degree - how do we get more people to appreciate the importance of this subject and how does it help you in life and business - what do we miss when we don't have mathematics as part of our studies?
  • A: I love numbers. They are the one thing makes absolute sense to me. 1+1 = 2, no matter what. The beauty of mathematics for me is that you have to think logically. The more logical one’s decisions are, the more I think you tend to make the correct decision. While this doesn’t always hold true, as things aren’t always black and white (my wife tends to point these circumstances out to me), in general it certainly helps to follow some sort of logic. Mathematics has helped me with that. For this reason I think most businesses are looking for employees with some basic mathematical skill which is essential for working in today’s world. Mathematics is a language and if we excluded it from our studies we would not have the ability to understand or to describe much of the world around us. We use mathematics in everything we do, from calculating how fast we are driving, to how much we can afford to spend and even to monitor how much petrol is in our car. I think the world would be lost without the ability to count, compare, understand or describe things using numbers.

  • Q: Inflation - are we bad at forecasting inflation accurately or do we follow the wrong formulas and data - do you see inflation changing much in the next few years?
  • A: Personally, I feel that analysts get longer-term inflation right more often than wrong, but the world we live in needs to know what the inflation rate is going to be over the next 12 months. The variables that change the prices of goods and services in an economy are extremely difficult to predict, especially in South Africa. The price of petrol, grain, sugar and many other products consumers use on a daily basis, depends on what the price of those goods are on world markets and the current exchange rate. As an example not many analysts would have accurately predicted that the Rand-US Dollar (USDZAR) exchange rate would have depreciated from R7.76 at the end of April 2012 to around R9.00 currently. This makes the job of an analyst so much more difficult and is why a longer-term inflation number seems to be easier to forecast. Regarding my expectation for inflation in the years ahead, it seems that world economies are printing more and more money and keeping bond yields lower for longer in an attempt to stimulate economic growth. With this surplus of money and low yields, the risk is for higher global inflation in the years ahead.

  • Q: What has been your best and worst investment decision?
  • A: I am still young and the only significant investment I have made is to buy a house. I purchased the worst house in a nice area and am hoping that after our renovations are complete that this will be one of my better investment decisions. My worst investment was buying a really expensive treadmill as it isn’t being used for running but rather for hanging up clothes.

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