Maximising Return Minimising Risk Maintaining Resilience
rainforest investment portfolio
Portfolio Attributes
Resilient portfolio shown to be capable of withstanding financial crises and economic slowdown.
Absolute positive returns.
Significant outperformance over the Index.
Contact Us to find out more about our investments and performance.
“I am concerned about my retirement planning, mortgage payments and cost of my children’s higher education. Rainforest’s efforts to understand my financial needs and to address them through careful and thoughtful investment is a great help to me.”
Rainforest Notes - MAY 2025
Our Investment Manager's Commentary for the Month
World markets - rallied after USA & China officials announced a 90-day truce, during which each side reduced tariffs against the other by 115%. Investors are concluding that further ratcheting up of tariffs is unlikely. We continue to monitor developments.
China – continues to push hard in the innovation space. Huawei announced it has started producing 5nm Chips, indicating that efforts to stop China from advancement in chip technology has likely failed. This has provided investment opportunities for us at Rainforest Research Investment Managers as a slew of semiconductor companies have emerged and listed in China. During the month, there was also a series of Humanoid Robot competitions held, where different companies competed on their humanoid robot development in areas of combat, chores, etc.
E.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWq8RebJeOc
Hong Kong – HK’s financial markets show continuing signs of improvement with the IPOs of CATL (batteries), Mirxes (biotech), etc. Going forward, there will be further benefit from companies (currently listed in USA & China) seeking secondary listings, cementing HK’s position as a major financial centre. Trading volume is going up as well. A major developer, New World Development, is currently facing liquidity pressure, but this is not expected to pose risk to HK’s financial system. However, it reflects challenges in the property sector.
Singapore – The ruling party PAP improved its vote count in Singapore’s latest General Election. Investors welcomed the news, seeing it as a sign of stability and continuity.
Another notable development in recent times is the simultaneous weakening of USA equity, bond and foreign exchange rates. This indicates that foreign investors may be shifting out of US-denominated assets. This will not affect those of our investment portfolios which are quoted in USD, as the underlying assets are all denominated in Asian currencies.
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Fund Factsheet
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NEWS
Interview of Richard Choong in The Edge
Investing Wisdom
Value and Quality
“...findings of a review of the 1000 largest US equities (by market cap) over 1975-2013. Value was a higher driver of performance than quality, but companies that were both high quality and inexpensively valued with respect to fundamentals delivered the most consistent outperformance....”
Market Ups and Downs
“It’s in the nature of stock markets to go way down from time to time. There’s no system to avoid bad markets. You can’t do it unless you try to time the market, which is a seriously dumb thing to do. Conservative investing with steady savings without expecting miracles is the way to go. ”
Why Invest in Equities
“Investment possibilities are both many and varied. There are three major categories, however, and it’s important to understand the characteristics of each. So let’s survey the field.
Investments that are denominated in a given currency include money-market funds, bonds, mortgages, bank deposits, and other instruments. Most of these currency-based investments are thought of as “safe.” In truth they are among the most dangerous of assets. Their beta may be zero, but their risk is huge. …
The second major category of investments involves assets that will never produce anything,… forever unproductive… The major asset in this category is gold. …
My own preference - and you knew this was coming – is our third category: investment in productive assets, whether businesses, farms, or real estate. …
Berkshire’s goal will be to increase its ownership of first-class businesses. Our first choice will be to own them in their entirety – but we will also be owners by way of holding sizable amounts of marketable stocks. I believe that over any extended period of time this category of investing will prove to be the runaway winner among the three we’ve examined. More important, it will be BY FAR the safest.”