Marko Dimitrijevic on "Passive vs active investments in frontier markets"

5/25/2017

Passive Vs. Active Investments in Frontier Markets | Marko Dimitrijevic

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Passive Vs. Active Investments in Frontier Markets Company Proﬁle: FHOOSH

Passive Vs. Active Investments in Frontier Markets What great frontier story, from the Wild West to outer space, ever featured a passive hero? Answer: none. The same can be said of a frontier market investment strategy. When it comes to frontier markets, active, engaged, and quick to react is the way to go. Why? Because, as I’ve discussed in my book, a frontier market doesn’t behave in the same way as a developed market.

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5/25/2017

Passive Vs. Active Investments in Frontier Markets | Marko Dimitrijevic

react is the way News from Marko Dimitrijevicto goContact ow.ly/Qhiy30c2Ur9 #emergingmarkets Passive investment management is investing on autopilot. You buy 2 hours ago either the underlying stocks that compose a market index or a fund that mirrors the index. The argument for passive investing is that I just published “Passive Vs. markets are efﬁcient, and trying to select individual stocks to beat Active the market’s return is a waste of time and money. Proponents of Investments in passive investing point to numerous studies that show (mainly for Frontier Markets” medium.com/p/passiveU.S. equity managers) that the average active manager vs-a… underperforms the market after fees. 2 hours ago

Pitfalls of Passive Investing Meet Marko Dimitrijevic

This may be true, but outside the heavily researched and very liquid developed markets, passive investing encounters two major pitfalls: indices do not accurately reﬂect the composition of the universe they purport to represent; and they completely miss many attractive investments in under-researched, misunderstood, and hard-to-access countries and companies. Such opportunities can be uncovered only through active management. This has been true in mainstream emerging markets for the past two decades, and it is even truer in frontier markets today. For example, let’s look at the granddaddy of emerging market indices: The MSCI Emerging Markets Index. There were ten countries in the original 1988 index. Four— Argentina, Greece, Jordan, and Portugal—are no longer in the index, but the total is now up to 24 countries. In terms of weighting, the remaining original six countries today constitute less than 20 percent of the total index; the 18 new countries, which include Korea and three of the four BRICs, account for the other 80+ percent. Clearly, this index undergoes frequent change; but even with continual updates, it cannot always capture the emerging universe in a timely manner, and it mostly looks through a rearview mirror. Index investing can therefore force you to buy past winners regardless of their future prospects. Frontier benchmarks face similar limitations. MSCI launched its Frontier Markets Index in late 2007 with 19 countries. By the end of

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5/25/2017

Passive Vs. Active Investments in Frontier Markets | Marko Dimitrijevic

an hour 2016, five countries (including two countries representing a Meet Marko Dimitrijevic News from Marko Dimitrijevicow.ly/Sqyf30bW0Q1 Contact combined 30 percent of the index) were dropped and nine new 2 days ago countries added. On June 1 of this year, Pakistan—9 percent of the FM index—is being moved to the EM index—with a weighting of just 0.2 percent. And currently under review, Argentina (19 percent of the FM index today) and Nigeria (19 percent of the index just three years ago) may be dropped in the coming year. This flux in the composition of indices underscores the first pitfall of passive investing in developing markets: Indices do not reflect the reality of the universes they purport to represent. The second pitfall of passive investing is that it gives investors no freedom of choice. (For specific information on ETFs, please see chapter 7 of my book, Frontier Investor.) While passive investors are stuck with the index constituents, active investors can use a combined top-down and bottom-up approach. Active investors, therefore, can pick better companies from those countries already in an index and also expand their universe to encompass countries with strong and improving fundamentals that are implementing structural reforms. For example, for many years one of the largest country exposures in our frontier market funds was Saudi Arabia, which is not even part of the benchmark frontier index. It is, however, one of the deepest and most liquid markets in my frontier universe, and helped us generate market-beating returns that a passive plan would never have produced. May 22nd, 2017 | Blog | 0 Comments

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