Rob Dower

Rob Dower

Rob joined Allan Gray in August 2003 and was chief operating officer from June 2009 to June 2018. He was formerly a management consultant with McKinsey and is a graduate of UCT and of INSEAD.

Articles by Rob Dower

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2018 Q1 Comments from the Chief Operating Officer

By Rob Dower on 19 Apr 2018

Reading time: 7 mins

Between countries and within a country over time, there is a strong correlation between the proportion of respondents answering on a standard survey that...

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2017 Q4 Comments from the Chief Operating Officer

By Rob Dower on 24 Jan 2018

Reading time: 8 mins

Rightly, in the past year, there has been an increase in public pressure on fund managers like us to actively exercise clients' ownership responsibilities,...

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2017 Q3 Comments from the Chief Operating Officer

By Rob Dower on 24 Oct 2017

Reading time: 6 mins

O ver the course of history, scientists and engineers have made steady progress, with each discovery or innovation building on the last. On the other hand,...

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2017 Q2 Comments from the Chief Operating Officer

By Rob Dower on 20 Jul 2017

Reading time: 6 mins

UK academics working at the London Business School (LBS) produced a book about 15 years ago called Triumph of the Optimists, comparing 101 years of stock...

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2017 Q1 Comments from the Chief Operating Officer

By Rob Dower on 31 Mar 2017

Reading time: 6 mins

Turkey’s President Erdoğan has recently won a controversial referendum to expand his executive powers and extend his maximum term by 10 years. The UK is...

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2016 Q3 Comments from the Chief Operating Officer

By Rob Dower on 30 Sep 2016

Reading time: 7 mins

It is so easy to get caught up in the latest bad news (and there has been a lot of it in the week I’m writing this) that we can miss the underlying positive...

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2016 Q2 Comments from the Chief Operating Officer

By Rob Dower on 30 Jun 2016

Reading time: 7 mins

Trust and confidence are especially important for financial markets. Everything that changes hands in financial markets represents a promise of one kind or...

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2016 Q1 Comments from the Chief Operating Officer

By Rob Dower on 31 Mar 2016

Reading time: 6 mins

With political volatility at home, uncertain economic prospects in China and potential changes to the monetary policy momentum in the US, South African share...

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2015 Q4 Comments from the Chief Operating Officer

By Rob Dower on 31 Dec 2015

Reading time:

As set out in his letter to clients, our founder, Allan WB Gray, and his family have transferred their controlling interests in Allan Gray and Orbis to the...

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2015 Q3 Comments from the Chief Operating Officer

By Rob Dower on 30 Sep 2015

Reading time: 7 mins

When you buy a share you invest what the current owner is willing to sell it for. As the share's new owner, your returns come from a stream of dividends (whi...

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2015 Q2 Comments from the Chief Operating Officer

By Rob Dower on 30 Jun 2015

Reading time: 6 mins

The Greek crisis dominated the headlines for much of the second quarter, along with the slowdown in growth and massive stock market volatility in China....

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2015 Q1 Comments from the Chief Operating Officer

By Rob Dower on 31 Mar 2015

Reading time: 8 mins

This Quarterly Commentary is dedicated to Simon Marais, chairman of Allan Gray Limited, who passed away on 26 February this year. In recent issues we have...

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2014 Q4 Comments from the Chief Operating Officer

By Rob Dower on 31 Dec 2014

Reading time: 7 mins

We were expecting 2014 to be a tough year for South Africa's economy and the JSE and, where our mandates allow, we invested cautiously in anticipation of thi...

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2014 Q3 Comments from the Chief Operating Officer

By Rob Dower on 30 Sep 2014

Reading time: 7 mins

My early career and training was as a mechanical engineer. Engineers deal with uncertainty in design by applying a 'safety factor' to their sums: if...

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2014 Q2 Comments from the Chief Operating Officer

By Rob Dower on 30 Jun 2014

Reading time: 7 mins

If a company keeps doing something for many years, it eventually becomes part of its wiring. One could ascribe the modest success that Allan Gray Proprietary...

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2014 Q1 Comments from the Chief Operating Officer

By Rob Dower on 31 Mar 2014

Reading time: 5 mins

Adding value through stock picking, here and abroad As you are most probably aware, asset allocation funds have the mandate to vary their exposure to asset...

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2013 Q4 Comments from the Chief Operating Officer

By Rob Dower on 31 Dec 2013

Reading time: 7 mins

Is investor behaviour improving? It has been more than a year since I last reported to you on investor returns being distinct from fund returns in our unit...

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2013 Q3 Comments from the Chief Operating Officer

By Rob Dower on 30 Sep 2013

Reading time: 5 mins

Our first article this quarter is Sandy McGregor's economic commentary arguing for the US Federal Reserve (the Fed) to begin its long-awaited return to a mor...

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2013 Q2 Comments from the Chief Operating Officer

By Rob Dower on 30 Jun 2013

Reading time: 6 mins

We have written before about the importance of diversifying your portfolio. Diversification allows you to take individual risks (for example, investments in ...

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2013 Q1 Comments from the Chief Operating Officer

By Rob Dower on 31 Mar 2013

Reading time: 5 mins

South Africans save too little in general but we especially save too little for retirement. People who have no savings have to live only off the returns they...

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2012 Q4 Comments from the Chief Operating Officer

By Rob Dower on 31 Dec 2012

Reading time: 5 mins

The Allan Gray group exists to make money for our clients. This is a good objective. Mostly our clients are regular people with everyday goals: to retire wit...

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2012 Q3 Comments from the Chief Operating Officer

By Rob Dower on 30 Sep 2012

Reading time: 4 mins

We have made the point many times in this magazine and on other platforms that the best investment opportunities are often not to be found in industries or...

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2012 Q2 Comments from the Chief Operating Officer

By Rob Dower on 30 Jun 2012

Reading time: 6 mins

This magazine includes the performance of all of our funds in its last few pages, based on a single lump sum invested at each starting point, as is required ...

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2012 Q1 Comments from the Chief Operating Officer

By Rob Dower on 31 Mar 2012

Reading time: 5 mins

A nominal interest rate is the rate you pay or receive before taking inflation into account. This is the rate you see quoted on money market funds and on...

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2011 Q4 Comments from the Chief Operating Officer

By Rob Dower on 31 Dec 2011

Reading time: 5 mins

Over the tumultuous past year, the returns from lump sum investments in the Allan Gray Balanced, Stable and Equity Funds differ by less than 3%, and over the...

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2011 Q3 Comments from the Chief Operating Officer

By Rob Dower on 30 Sep 2011

Reading time: 4 mins

In a 2008 global survey of trust run by Edelman, a consultancy, US and UK respondents rated banks at 70% and 46% respectively in answer to the question 'How...

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2011 Q2 Comments from the Chief Operating Officer

By Rob Dower on 30 Jun 2011

Reading time: 4 mins

We are conservatively positioned in the portfolios that we manage for clients and have been for some time, to the extent that we have discretion to be so. Th...

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2011 Q1 Comments from the Chief Operating Officer

By Rob Dower on 31 Mar 2011

Reading time: 5 mins

There are a few ways in which we can reduce short-term risk in a portfolio and not all of these require that there is a matching dilution in long-term return...

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2010 Q4 Comments from the Chief Operating Officer

By Rob Dower on 31 Dec 2010

Reading time: 5 mins

It has been an interesting year. Twelve months ago, I wrote that we did not think share price valuations were justified by the fundamentals of SA listed...

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2010 Q3 Comments from the Chief Operating Officer

By Rob Dower on 30 Sep 2010

Reading time: 4 mins

In past issues we have highlighted the potential gap between a unit trust's returns and the returns achieved by the average investor in that fund. A fund's...

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2010 Q2 Comments from the Chief Operating Officer

By Rob Dower on 30 Jun 2010

Reading time: 4 mins

In the last six weeks South Africa has been aglow with positive sentiment and optimism. The World Cup has had a real impact on national unity and confidence ...

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2010 Q1 Comments from the Chief Operating Officer

By Rob Dower on 31 Mar 2010

Reading time: 4 mins

In a recent GrayIssue, our monthly electronic newsletter, we noted that a significant portion of the Allan Gray Equity Fund's outperformance came from...

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2009 Q4 Comments from the chief operating officer

By Rob Dower on 31 Dec 2009

Reading time: 4 mins

When I returned to South Africa from London with my young family in the early part of the last decade, we thought we were trading economic security for a...

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2009 Q3 Comments from the chief operating officer

By Rob Dower on 30 Sep 2009

Reading time: 4 mins

As I write, the JSE is more than double its March low when priced in US dollars. To justify the current stock market valuation on a PE multiple hovering arou...

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