May 2023

The world is your oyster

Insurance is all about risk; identifying it, understanding it, quantifying it, pricing it, and managing it.

Tony Van Niekerk

When it comes to investment strategies, diversification is up there as one of the most important. Diversification mainly includes, currency and geo-political risk, economic cycle risk, and sector disruption risk. However, once you start getting technical and personal, the opportunity cost includes, family structures, income and capital gains tax, regulatory changes, unexpected innovations, and longevity developments, amongst others.

It is not as straight forward as simply deciding what the general offshore average is and whether you are looking at long- or short term investing. When taking all the various factors into account, it is clear that South Africa is still very much in the mix as part of a diversified portfolio.

What is clear from the various contributions to this feature, is not only that advice is essential to this process, but that advisors should also be consulting technical experts when it comes to factors like regulatory requirements and pitfalls in the various jurisdictions. It can be a minefield, where clients lose, rather than benefit, from their diversification efforts.

In this issue we also explore the world of agri insurance, although it seems very few product providers are willing to share information on their initiatives and endeavours in this segment. The few contributions we received indicates a massive need for protection of especially small-scale farmers. Who will take the lead in this segment? The jury is out.

Wishing you all a fair amount of knowledge gained after reading this edition.

Tony

“What is clear from the various contributions to this feature, is not only that advice is essential to this process, but that advisors should also be consulting technical experts when it comes to factors like regulatory requirements and pitfalls in the various jurisdictions.”

Tony van Niekerk