BNC#9 | Piet Viljoen cuts through the BS: What actually drives your returns (it's not complicated)

He's run money through three decades of market cycles, from Allan Gray to Investec to his own boutique, RECM. Now Piet Viljoen stands in front of a room of investment professionals and calls a chunk of his own industry's output, by his own word, bullshit. Jargon, product complexity, benchmarks, forecasts, fee layers: Viljoen takes a scalpel to each one and asks a single question of every part of the machine: does removing this make you worse off? His answer, most of the time, is no. This is via negativa applied to your money, and it is not comfortable listening for the industry that profits from complexity.