Aug. 29 (Bloomberg) — Thomas Saulnier, portfolio manager at Gaia Capital Advisors, discusses investment strategy.
He speaks from Geneva with Owen Thomas on Bloomberg Television’s “Countdown.” (Source: Bloomberg)
We’re joined from geneva by thomas sunny he’s a portfolio manager at gaia capital advisors which manages a hundred million dollars uh good to see you there thomas when you look at the world right now what worries you the most hi uh actually uh the macro picture these days is quite clear we have
We live in a bipolar world with on one hand western economies are facing a low or no growth uh they face a huge debt and on the other hand you have emerging markets with a growth potential but they certainly have their own inflation issue and i think the key element these days
Uh has been in western economies this switch from a stimulus policy to uh to implementation of austerity measures and and we definitely think that uh uh it’s certainly uh positive and useful to tackle deficits and uh and to address that issue in the in the long run but in
The short run it’s going to wait on on personal consumption and uh it’s going to wait on investment so it’s uh it’s uh it’s uh it’s negative for for growth in the in the short run now you went into major sorry to interrupt you i was going to
Say you managed a major aggregate fund is the only way it’s the only way up right now as as far as food and food commodity prices are concerned is that where the growth in that side of the commodity is coming from yeah for sure actually in such in such a
Challenging uh environment we we definitely want to uh to get exposure to to safe assets and in us or commodity space the two of you safe assets are a agree land and be a gold so within our portfolio we definitely increase the exposure to to agree land through investment in companies that
Have access and ownership to a green land especially in emerging markets where the agri land is quite attractive and and farming is a is a business in emerging markets that is not subsidized unlike in in developed markets and we also increase our exposure to to gold we think that
I mean 2008 cash was king now 2011 a gold is king uh mainly because we live in a in a negative real interest rate environment even though even sorry can i just button because even though gold has lost 11 and we have a number of analysts around the world who are actually saying
You know what gold is a major asset bubble which is about to burst do you take a different view still i i would not uh i would not say so i would not be uh so so negative on gold but what what what i can say that
Probably it could be for for from an investor point of view if you don’t have exposure to gold right now i will not go for gold physicals because it’s probably a bit late in the cycle so i would definitely favor investing in gold mining stocks simply because gold mining stocks have
Lagged the gold price appreciation recently and right now you can find many uh many gold companies that are in a producing phase uh trading at really attractive valuation in terms of price to nav and actually in terms of enterprise value to to ounce you can buy a gold mining stocks for 300 usd
Per ounce of gold in the ground so so definitely there is a there is mainly many attractive opportunities within within the gold mining stocks you also said just a moment ago that you’re interested in agri-land what about the different sectors in agriculture itself what we’ve got we’ve got soya beans at a
Five-month high corn predicted to rise even further very briefly corn wheat that sort of thing sawyer bullish on those yeah for sure actually the beauty of agree commodities is that it’s kind of decorated to the to the economic situation especially because the main drivers for agriculture is a long-term
Secular driver such as population growth a change in consumption habits in emerging markets limited arable lands so that’s kind of drivers that are uncorrelated to to economic situations so from an investor point of view to get exposure to agriculture is a good way to diversify yourself from the from the
Economic situation and and the challenging times that we are going through they are challenging indeed thomas sonia really great to talk to you from geneva thank you very much