Hendrik du Toit, chief executive of South Africa's Investec Asset Management, told delegates at the Morningstar Investment Conference 2012 in London that investment would become an increasingly global choice and the US was about to join in.

Mr du Toit was being interviewed in the chief executive profile section at the conference by Morningstar's Richard Romer-Lee on the ingredients that make a successful asset management company as well as his views on the current industry and market environment. He said investment globalisation is "here to stay" and advisers and investors had to get used to it.

However he warned that investors and investors should be realistic about the return and focus on value and quality. He said there was a "a lot of yield chasing going on" and fund managers should not be greedy.

On the suggestion raised earlier in the day by Katie Koch of Goldman Sachs that 25 per cent of portfolios should be in emerging markets he said he agreed with that as an investment principle. He said we were moving into a world where "we don't have to all be domestic investors" and so-called "home bias" should be questioned.

"Domestic bias has a lot to do with peer-group benchmarking," he said. One key isssue he added was the cost of living in the country we plan to retire in. He said many South Africans had taken money out of the country in years past.

He said investors should probably spread their risks between home and overseas risk and one key change coming down the line, he believed, was that US investors would lose their home bias and start investing more around the world and that would have huge implications for global investment.

He said the centre of his business was now London although it was at heart an African company. He said his firm was targeting institutional money being invested across the globe. He believes the oil rich nations have to invest internationally so "we go where the big pots of money are." He says Investec also has a very strong bias towards emerging markets.