History
NavraInvest is the brainchild of Steve Navra and it is thanks to his vision and his driving force that the company exists today. It is also only through the support and incredible belief of Steve's clients that he was able to realise his vision of creating a company through which to offer his business and investment philosophies to the wider market.
The NavraInvest journey started in the 1980s when Steve joined forces with a stock broking company. The predictive nature of fundamental technical analysis left him with an indelible and unswerving belief in how investment decisions should not be made. Steve soon came to believe the futility of the mass of forward looking analysis that was generated to support investment decisions and the equally voluminous amount of data that was generated to explain why those decisions had not turned out as previously predicted.
Steve developed the view that forward looking data might be useful to establish a few general parameters but to invest on what people think might happen in the future is little more than gambling. He began to see that what really matters is what is happening now and how the market reacts to everyday events. So Steve's methodology began to take shape - find financially sound and well managed companies and then focus on their short-term price movements.
Over the years Steve dabbled in the market using his methodologies and he continued to develop a means for analysing short-term share price movements. This was hampered by the massive amount of data that has to be analysed. However, the huge advances in computing power have meant that over the last few years Steve has been able to refine his investment management system, which he called the NavTraDE system and which NavraInvest now owns and uses to run its portfolios.
Steve came to Australia in 1990 and built a very successful financial advisory business based on property investment. It was the constant requests from clients for advice on the share market that led Steve to develop an early working version of the NavTraDE system. In early 2000 he handed this out to a number of clients to "beta test". The result was quite amazing - some clients traded stocks using the system and some just paper traded but all agreed it worked and gave superior results from investing than other funds or managers they had used before.
The system, however, was time consuming for individuals with busy lives and jobs and it requires real time price and volume data on shares to operate at its optimum. So Steve's clients encouraged him to develop a fund into which they could invest and which he could run using the NavTraDE system. This was the catalyst for NavraInvest Limited. In November 2002, capital was raised from Steve's client base to fund the set up of an investment management company. During the months that followed an application was made to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission for an Australian Financial Services Licence. Staff were recruited, service providers appointed and the whole operating structure established to operate a modern professional Investment Management Company was established.
On April 17, 2003, NavraInvest was granted its licence and on April 28, our first two funds were launched - The Navra Blue Chip Australian Share Wholesale Fund and The Navra Blue Chip Australian Share Retail Fund.
NavraInvest had arrived.
In some ways this is the culmination of Steve's dream, but in many ways it is just the beginning of a bigger and more exciting journey.