The SAIY Team

Sameer Vallie, the founder, and CEO of SAIY Asset Management completed his training as a technical trader through an EU-based institution, London Trading Group. He has spent many years developing, testing, and fine tuning his unique investment and trading strategies and has successfully implemented these strategies for clients, family businesses and as a consultant. Having consistently achieved significant investment gains and grown the assets under his management by 300% over the last 5 years and has been responsible for AUM of over R1 billion.

Sameer has also been actively involved in several non-conflicting business ventures and remains a director of a number of these. His entrepreneurial spirit has resulted in a wealth of experience in managing businesses, taking appropriate risk, and managing expectations from clients. He has learned, to make a success of anything, you need to have a clear vision, an executable plan, and the right resources in place.

Through these ventures, he developed several of the principles that he brings to SAIY Asset Management today: to do something well requires simplicity, honesty, and consistency and to do it well for all clients all the time requires a fair, smart and repeatable process. Transparency and alignment of interests are paramount to gaining loyal, long term investment partners. As a measure of confidence and, importantly, to be client centric, SAIY Asset Management will only earn a fee once the return target for each Fund has been met. There is no management fee. There is only one motivation: deliver the returns promised before you get paid.

Gerald de Villiers has over 13 years of experience in the financial markets and brings a wealth of business and investment management expertise to SAIY Asset Management and its clients. His role as COO is to oversee the operations of the company. Gerald works together with Sameer to manage client investment portfolios. Gerald’s focus is on technical analysis and portfolio risk management.

Gerald is seen as a leading authority in the global financial market (forex) and served as a keynote speaker at various international trading events. He met Sameer in 2018 and together they have jointly enhanced their proprietary trading methodology. Gerald and Sameer share the vision and ethos of SAIY Asset Management and are bound by a common love of trading, their intellectual curiosity, and their practical approach to financial markets. They both love to see their clients prosper.

Gerald’s focus is to ensure that SAIY Asset Management continues to deliver investment returns to clients that are consistent with the stated objectives. Targeting risk levels, maximising portfolio efficiency and minimising costs are all core to achieving these objectives and Gerald is tasked with ensuring that the operational processes and procedures are in place for effective portfolio management and transparent and clear reporting.

Philippa has over 25 years of investment experience, the last 12 of which have been focused solely on investment operations, fund structuring (onshore and offshore), compliance, development of a sound investment infrastructure and the implementation of effective risk management and compliance plans.

Prior to returning to South Africa in 2012, Philippa was investment director and portfolio manager for several large institutional fund of hedge fund portfolios in London, where she gained significant exposure to investment strategies and implemented sound operational due diligence practices for manager selection. As part of the investment committee, she was responsible for the top-quartile performance of the various absolute return mandates she managed.

Her current qualifications consist of B Bus Sc., Major in Economics, Honours in Information System from the University of Cape Town. She is a CFA Charter holder and has completed the FSCA Regulatory Examinations: Representatives, FSPs and Key Individuals in Categories I, II, IIA, III and IV; JSE Registered Person (SAIFM).

Mr Lorgat is a professional independent non-executive director presently serving on several company boards. He brings a wealth of experience and expertise to SAIY Asset Management’s Advisory Board.

After graduating from Rhodes University, he qualified as a Chartered Accountant in 1985. Since then, he has traversed many roles including more than 25 years in the audit and accountancy profession and 10 years as a global chief executive. He was a Senior Partner at EY (formerly known as Emst & Young), was Managing Partner of the EY Cape Town office and had served on the firm’s National Executive Committee until he left in 2007 to establish a private equity business.

In 2008 his professional career took an unexpected turn when he was recruited in a world-wide search by a London-based recruitment agency to be the third chief executive of the International Cricket Council (ICC). As a global CEO based in Dubai, he gained a wealth of experience in leading a multi-billion-dollar business with global partners such as Emirates Airline, PepsiCo, LG, Hyundai, Reliance and Yahoo among other global corporations. He has travelled extensively and has dealt with senior political, business, government, and sports leaders around the world, in the process building a privileged international network and reputation.

Prior to his appointment at the ICC, he served as an independent director on Boards the most notable being the listed company Santam. In Nov 2012, on his return to South Africa, he was appointed as the first independent chairman of Curo Fund Services, an investment administration services company jointly owned by Old Mutual Plc and Sanlam Ltd. Curo has assets under administration exceeding R2,8 trillion. Haroon is still the chairman of the Curo Board while also serving on the boards of Satrix investments (R160bn AUM) among other directorships.