Tracking A Formidable Market Operator

Bruce Ackerman has a wealth of experience in global asset management and is one of the industry’s most successful. He manages the Sasfin Global Equity Fund and sees strong economic recovery next year.

- Leon Kok

Little is generally known about the Sasfin BCI Global Equity Feeder Fund, but one of its greatest attributes is that its underlying offshore fund is managed by Bruce Ackerman, one of the global asset management industry’s most experienced and successful operatives.

Son of Ackermans stores patriarch Gus Ackerman and brother of Pick n Pay founder Raymond, Bruce was born in Cape Town in 1944, graduated with an economics and MBA degrees at UCT in the late-1960s, and then headed to the UK where he managed some of the country’s biggest and most successful funds. This included 24 years with Lloyds Bank’s institutional investment arm in London as a fund manager, also fulfilling the roles of its chief investment officer and joint managing director from the early 1980s until his return to SA in 1994.

During this time Ackerman was also executive director of five listed European and Asian country funds. He then joined Foord Asset Management in 1994 and co-managed the highly-acclaimed Foord International Trust from 1997 to 2011.

In 2014 Sasfin set up a model portfolio as guidance for its portfolio managers whose clients sought overseas leads and exposure, and Ackerman was invited to advise on it together with its investment research head, Bradley Mitchell.

Sasfin drew confidence from its significant outperformance of the world equities index and so launched its global equity fund in June 2017 and then its local feeder fund in October that year. It’s particularly suitable for those with longer-term investment horizons who wish to gain non-SA equity exposure.