Damon O’Brien, CFA
Chief Investment Officer, Consilium
What are some of your career highlights so far?
Being lucky enough to find the right job in the right industry at the right time. Over the last six years at Consilium we’ve been quietly building a business to help champion professional financial advice and those who provide it. We now work with many of New Zealand’s elite independent advisers and it never stops being humbling when they choose to partner with Consilium to assist them in the delivery of outstanding advice.
What do you like most about your job/industry?
The knowledge that if we do our job right we can help have a lasting positive impact on people’s lives. Put simply, we help contribute to thousands of New Zealander’s making more informed decisions that enable them to achieve more of what they most desire throughout their lives. It’s easy to be motivated to come to work when that’s where your effort is going.
What are your interests outside work?
Hitting the perfect 3 wood, family, friends, sports, reading and travel, not necessarily in that order. Well . . . hitting the perfect 3 wood is probably first, but everything else is a close second!
Make a prediction for 2024
Accurately forecasting the future is hard. Within the investment world there is a wealth of academic and empirical evidence that confirms this and it’s why SPIVA data consistently reminds us the majority of active fund managers fail to beat their benchmarks. Within Consilium we believe there are far more reliably productive activities we can focus on for investors that don’t include taking a forecasting-based approach to investing. My prediction is that the very clear global trend we have witnessed for a number of years – the significant flow of funds away from generally higher cost and forecasting-based investment strategies, towards lower cost strategies – will continue unabated. In aggregate, investors are already voting with their wallets and I don’t see that changing in the future.