Five years ago, potential government intervention was never something Alec Cutler, a veteran portfolio manager, had to think about when considering an investment.

Now the Orbis Investments director has to check his social-media feeds as soon as he wakes up to find out what American president Donald Trump tweeted in the wee hours of the morning.

He called Mr Trump a “governmental random number generator”.

“You never know what he is going to tweet,” Mr Cutler said.

For the first time in his 30-year investments career, the global political climate is keeping Mr Cutler up at night.

He is not just worried about negative impact from tariffs and wars, but also thinking about potential opportunities for his clients.

“We need to be aware and appraise ourselves,” he said. “Sometimes those tweets are things that we were expecting, and sometimes they are a two-by-four against the side of the head to one of our companies. We have to roll with the punches and stay diversified.”

Managing balanced and moderate risk portfolios, his strategy has always been to find companies in the down cycle that are probably only there temporarily.

“We might look at 100 stocks and buy one,” he said.

The business has always been a bit of a gamble, but now he has to consider how government action will influence the anticipated upcycle.

For example, his team is closely looking at exercise clothing brand Lululemon, which has seen a significant drop in stock price this month, owing to tariff uncertainty and consumer softness.

Mr Cutler’s team now has to consider things like the impact of other countries such as Canada putting tariffs on imported apparel.

“That would be a government intervention that never would have crossed our minds five or six years ago,” he said. “There are so many other inputs to consider now.”

He explained that as the world matures and the population growth slows, economic activity also slows.

“Meanwhile, governments are increasing their debt levels,” Mr Cutler said. “The less growth you have, the less tailwind there is for governments to operate.”

As the tailwind gets thinner, he said, governments care more and more about how they are going to get their funding from financial markets. That causes them to get more involved.

“Historically, that happens until something really bad happens, and then the whole thing comes crashing down,” Mr Cutler said. “Some people think we are in the middle of that now.”

In response, Mr Cutler’s team positions client portfolios to take account of not only the risks out there, but also the potential benefits and opportunities.

“The best defence is a good offence,” Mr Cutler said.

He is a contrarian investor, avoiding stocks that have a lot of positive hype around them in favour of the wallflowers.

When everyone else was investing in solar and wind power, Mr Cutler’s team was looking at natural gas. A few years ago, it sold its shares in Danish wind energy company Vestas, and instead bought shares of natural gas company Siemens Energy, which were at a low.

“We just needed to wait,” Mr Cutler said. “Vestas continued to outperform Siemens Energy until 2023 and then Siemens went on a tear.”

Siemens Energy has made a turnaround in the past two years, and now has a market capitalisation of more than €73 billion (about $85 billion) and is the sixth biggest German company.

Mr Cutler’s strategy is working. Orbis’s multi-asset investment team was last week named fund manager of the year by British magazine Investment Week.

It was the third consecutive year that Mr Cutler and his team won the award for the 40 to 85 per cent shares category.

They also won the same award for the lower-risk 20 to 60 per cent shares category for the first time against 196 other funds, with the Orbis Global Cautious Fund.