The South African behind the top-performing Ranmore equity fund

Sean Peche has achieved something which very few fund managers can claim. He significantly outperformed the S&P 500 and MSCI World indices over one, three, and five years.

Peche is the founder of the investment company Ranmore Fund Management, which manages the Ranmore Global Equity Fund.

His investment career began in South Africa in 1997 when he joined Old Mutual Asset Management as an equity analyst.

In 1999, he joined Decillion Capital as one of its founding members and co-managed the successful BigRock Fund, a South African-based hedge fund.

In 2001, he relocated to London with Decillion Fund Management and co-managed a United States and European hedge fund.

In 2003, he joined London-based Orbis Investment Advisory, before leaving in 2008 to establish Ranmore Fund Management.

Peche created the Ranmore Global Equity Fund as a vehicle to provide investors with real returns through investments beyond traditional household name stocks.

Ranmore focuses on finding stocks offering investors good value for their money, which often includes small and medium-cap companies.

Peche has been a vocal critic of fund managers who use performance fees in conjunction with easy-to-beat benchmarks.

This, he said, creates a situation where fund managers charge investors a significant amount of fees while not providing them with adequate returns.

He practices what he preaches, and the Ranmore Global Equity Fund clearly states that it will never take performance fees.

The fund has a total expense ratio (TER) of 1.09%, which includes an investment management fee of 0.88% and administrative fees of 0.21%.

The TER is a measure of how much of the fund’s assets are relinquished as payments for services rendered in the administration of the Fund.

Ranmore Global Equity Fund performance

The Ranmore Global Equity Fund has two benchmarks against which it measures its performance – the MSCI World Index and the IA Global USD.

The fund outperformed these benchmarks in US Dollars over 1 year, 2 years, 3 years, 5 years, and 10 years.

It also provided much better returns for its investors since its inception in 2008 than the MSCI World Index and the IA Global USD.

This excellent performance explains Magus Heystek’s decision to invest in this fund in the battle with Piet Viljoen in terms of local versus offshore investments.

As this challenge is based on South African rand returns, Daily Investor compared the Ranmore Global Equity fund with two strong passively managed funds.

The Ranmore fund’s performance was expressed in rand terms and compared to the Satrix S&P 500 feeder fund and the Satrix MSCI World Feeder fund.

The Ranmore fund significantly outperformed these passively managed funds over one, three, and five years.

The table below provides a summary of the Ranmore Global Equity Fund’s performance against the Satrix S&P 500 feeder fund and the Satrix MSCI World Feeder fund.