How This Hedge Fund Manager Finds ‘Diamonds in the Dust’

By Isabella Ward and Merryn Somerset Webb

October 11, 2024 at 12:00AM EDT

A bull statue in front of the Shenzhen Stock Exchange building in Shenzhen, China on Tuesday, May 7, 2024. As the Chinese bond market undergoes a powerful rally, the nation's so-called policy banks are turning away from the People's Bank of China as a source of funding and rushing to raise debt instead. (Raul Ariano/Bloomberg)

(Bloomberg) -- Don’t meet with management, ignore narratives and avoid highly rated businesses—taken together that sounds like a recipe for hedge fund failure. But for Sean Peche, founder and portfolio manager at Ranmore Fund Management Ltd., it’s how he’s consistently outperformed benchmark indices. His Ranmore Global Equity Fund outperformed the MSCI World Index in 2022 and 2023.

Peche says his strategy is about minimizing biases. The 25-year industry veteran tells Merryn Somerset Webb on this week’s episode of Merryn Talks Money how his unorthodox approach has enabled him to successfully navigate tumultuous markets in Japan, the UK and China (where he contends the risk of regulatory interference has been “overplayed”).

“When people tell us something is uninvestable, that piques our interest,” Peche says. “Because there’s got to be some diamonds in the dust.” Also on this episode, Peche reveals where he sees value opportunities in the current market.