How did Graeme Forster, a mathematician from Wales, wind up in Hamilton, Bermuda, running a stock portfolio? His curriculum vitae is a bit unusual. So are the incentive fees collected by his employer, Orbis Investment Management, on the $7.5 billion he looks after. Unusual, especially, is his quirky collection of 65 stocks.

Forster is betting on antibody-based drugs with an unusual twist, on stockholder empowerment in Korea, on runaway inflation and, counterintuitively, on movie theaters. This looks nothing like an index fund. If it did, Orbis, compensated for beating indexes, would starve.

Forster landed a Ph.D. from Cambridge in 2007 by investigating the options embedded in farmers’ gut-instinct decisions about when and where to spend on pest control. No sooner was the ink dry on his thesis than he was working at Orbis, a global money manager that in hiring cares more about cleverness than Wall Street experience. At age 31 Forster was handed the reins of the international equity strategy.

Orbis was founded by the late billionaire Allan Gray, whose charitable foundation now pockets most of the profits. Gray chose, as the famous fund manager John Templeton did before him, an Atlantic island as the place in which to do his unconventional thinking. So it is that Forster, at 45, finds himself in an out-of-the-way place where there’s not much to do except think, tend to three kids and play golf.

Yes, there is a connection between those embedded options and the payoff on a stock. Forster’s target: a company with enough profits to justify its share price but also an implicit option on a........

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