From geopolitical conflict in the Middle East and ongoing tensions between major global powers to concerns about inflation, interest rates and the rapid rise of artificial intelligence, there is no shortage of headlines competing for investors' attention. Against this backdrop, how should offshore investing be approached?

According to Matthew Spencer, Director of UK Retail at Orbis, Allan Gray’s offshore investment partner, uncertainty is not something to be feared. In fact, it is often the source of opportunity.

“Investors tend to think they need certainty before they can invest with confidence,” said Spencer. "The reality is that uncertainty creates market dislocations, and those dislocations are where opportunities are often found."

Speaking at Allan Gray’s recent investment event The Times, Spencer outlined two golden rules that can help investors navigate uncertain markets: Seek opportunities where expectations are low, and ensure portfolios are actually diversified.

Rule #1: Seek opportunity where expectations are low

It is natural for investors to be drawn to markets, sectors or companies that are performing well and attracting positive attention. However, Spencer argues that some of the most compelling opportunities lie in areas where sentiment is weak and expectations are low.

"Where expectations are high, prices tend to be high as well, and the risk of disappointment increases," he said. "Conversely, when expectations are low, even modest improvements can create meaningful upside for investors."

This rule requires investors to look beyond prevailing narratives and focus instead on underlying value and fundamentals.

"The future is inherently unpredictable. Rather than trying to forecast every possible outcome, we focus on identifying businesses where the market's expectations appear too pessimistic relative to the underlying fundamentals, which we believe can reveal quality businesses trading at significant discounts to their intrinsic worth.”

One such business Orbis has identified is SK Square, a Korean holding company with a roughly 20% stake in memory maker SK Hynix. Spencer says that, despite SK Hynix’s earnings increasing more than tenfold over the past two years, the shares still trade at around five times price to earnings (as at April 2026).

“The market thinks that SK Hynix’s profit will fall, but we are of the view that it is likely to grow given the current spend on AI, which this year alone is projected to reach in excess of US$650 billion,” said Spencer.

This eye-watering amount adds up to triple the combined spend on some of the world’s biggest infrastructure projects to date, including the Burj Khalifa, the International Space Station, the Manhattan Project, the 2010 World Cup and the UK-France Channel Tunnel.

Rule #2: Ensure portfolios are actually diversified

The second rule is one that many investors believe they are already following: diversification.

However, Spencer cautioned that diversification is not simply about owning a large number of investments or spreading assets across different geographic regions.

"Becoming actually diversified means having exposure to investments whose return drivers are genuinely different from one another," he explains. "You want to avoid building a portfolio where all your investments are effectively dependent on the same outcome."

For example, a portfolio may appear diversified on paper because it contains multiple companies, sectors or countries. Yet if those investments are all reliant on the same economic conditions, technological trends or market sentiment, the portfolio may be more concentrated than investors realise.

Spencer believes investors should build portfolios that can perform across a range of possible futures rather than relying on a single economic or market outcome. For Orbis, this means picking a range of assets that withstand recessions, booms or busts, economic-agnostic cycles, as well as varying AI and currency outcomes.

"You want to have different horses in different races," he said, adding that artificial intelligence, economic growth, inflation and global trade wars all may see different scenarios play out.

Closing thought: Embrace uncertainty

"Nobody knows exactly what the next year, or even the next decade, will look like," Spencer said. "What investors can control is the quality of the businesses they own, the price they pay for those investments, and how diversified their portfolios are. If you do these things, it doesn’t matter what the future will throw at you.”