“What’s exciting for me is that I know this business, inside-out,” she said. “I understand the core investment process. And I understand its corporate culture really, really well.”
After her transition from the investing side to operations, she said her focus would be to grow and broaden Platypus’ investor base. The firm has a “strong” institutional support base and as well as money from retail investors.
Ms Stevanovic said the task at hand was to ensure a “sustainable and secure financial environment” for the investment team so they could focus on delivering strong returns.
The former stockpicker is also positive on the outlook for investing, despite the “residual uncertainty” from the macro-dominated environment.
The Bosnia-born investor described February’s reporting season as “largely benign”. She said the typical negative earnings revisions were “much smaller than what we normally see”.
“There is still uncertainty on the horizon,” she said. “The biggest risk to navigate through is if we ended up in a period of extended monetary tightening, driven by higher for longer inflation.”
“We’ve come out of a period where macro really dominated the market, and it’s nice to be in this environment where stock pickers can really add value.”
She said it was a constructive backdrop for active investors to “add value by sticking to our investment process, sticking to what we know and, making sure we’re finding investments in companies that can deliver earnings growth, despite this residual uncertainty on the outlook”.