This article first appeared in The Edge Malaysia Weekly on March 27, 2023 - April 2, 2023

Inter-Pacific Asset Management (IPAM) continues its winning streak. For the second year in a row, the InterPac Dana Safi won the Best Mixed Asset MYR Flexible (Islamic) Fund award for the three-year category.

Meanwhile, InterPac Dynamic Equity took home the Best Mixed Asset MYR Flexible (Malaysia) award for the three-year category.

Heddy Humaizi Hussain, its senior vice-

president and fund manager, attributes the win to its ability to pick long-term winners. “Our philosophy is that we invest in good businesses with strong fundamentals that can weather economic crises, geopolitical turmoil and black swan events.

“In addition, we combine fundamental and technical analysis in our investment process and manage our portfolios more actively,” he says.

Despite the wild swings in the market last year, Heddy says, the firm remained fully invested throughout the 12 months, instead of adopting a more aggressive trading strategy. The reason being that timing the market comes with a cost, which includes trading fees and buying and selling stocks at an inappropriate time.

“Market timing can come at a great cost, as turning points [in markets] often arrive with little warning,” he says.

When markets are volatile and negative, fearful investors would put in redemption requests and pull out their funds from asset management firms, potentially resulting in losses. So, Heddy’s job as a fund manager includes initiating good communication with clients to convince them to keep their money with the firm, and let the firm put that money to work when investment opportunities emerge.

“We communicated with our investors and told them to look at the long term. Market volatility is here to stay,” he says.

The key challenge last year was evidenced by the 19% loss in global equities while the Malaysian market fell 4.3%, says Heddy. He and his team were constantly asking themselves if the market had properly valued lower corporate earnings, and whether the global economy and markets would weaken further than anticipated.

Yet, Heddy and his team persevered by constantly seeking new investment opportunities, including identifying battered stocks with strong fundamentals and earnings potential.

On the domestic front, the biggest challenge to Heddy was weak investor sentiment of the retail investors, partly due to tumultuous political developments. That affected not only foreign institutional investors, but also made local investors more reluctant to invest, says Heddy.

“Nonetheless, with the overall political situation being more stable now, we are expecting the domestic market (in terms of the take-up rate of unit trust funds) to perform better in the coming months,” he says.

While 2023 is expected to be a better year than the last, investors are not out of the woods yet. Heddy says the markets are likely to remain volatile as investors are still assessing the possibility of a global recession, especially in the US.

But he is confident that IPAM will be able to navigate through coming storms, if any.

“Our portfolio managers are more than capable of dealing with those potential headwinds. Besides managing local unit trust funds, IPAM also manages global private mandate investments, which enable us to make better decisions based on our understanding of the global economy and markets,” says Heddy.

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