Blog - May 15th, 2024
Is China investible?
In a previous blog, we briefly posed the question “Is China investible?” and promised a more complete answer at a later date. A full accounting would probably need several hundred pages to cover all the relevant material, but here we aim to address what the key issues are for Mount Murray Investment and our clients.
ReadBlog – March 26th, 2024
2023 markets performance recap
In 2023, the MSCI All Country World Index (ACWI) had a return of 22.8%. Eastern European countries like Hungary and Poland had the highest returns at 51% and 50% respectively, while Hong Kong, Thailand, and China had double-digit losses at -15%, -11%, and -11% respectively last year. The average return for MSCI ACWI countries was 17% and the average return for MSCI Emerging Markets countries was 18%.
ReadBlog – December 14th, 2023
A solution to get to Net Zero
When looking at staggering numbers such as the projected demand in critical minerals required in the world for the green transition to Net Zero by 2050, we need to ask ourselves what we could be getting wrong. A closer look at the uses of those various minerals shows a large allocation to the replacement of the global auto fleet by electric vehicles. It seems logical that to solve our dilemma of extracting more than projected production and creating too much waste at the same time, we would need to cut back massively on our use of cars. Autonomous driving may be the solution.
ReadBlog – December 7th, 2023
What the world needs now is love… of mines
Much has been said about the need for the commodities required for the transition to a greener economy. Mine production capacity now requires accelerated investment and expansion to meet the critical mineral demand growth implicit in the Net Zero scenario. Any critical mineral supply bottleneck will present a binding constraint on the feasibility of achieving the Net Zero target. However, developing mining projects can take a very long time, often a decade, and presents various challenges, at both the company and country level.
ReadBlog – November 21st, 2023
A reversal of fortunes
The end of October brought a reversal in performance in the US, global and emerging markets. However, a review of the drivers of this reversal shows it is very different in developed vs emerging markets.
ReadBlog - November 14th, 2023
Random acts of government and the law of unintended consequences
Government action can often be the source of “exogenous shocks”. Last week, we saw such a random act of government when the South Koreans banned short selling over the weekend of November 4th/5th. The government described it as a “temporary measure” (it is supposed to run out in June next year) aimed at “fundamentally easing the tilted playing field between institutional and retail investors.” One has to ask how a “temporary measure” thrown together over a weekend will solve a fundamental problem of any sort, but when we remember that there will be a general election in South Korea in April next year, we get a better idea of the government’s true intent.
ReadBlog – November 6th, 2023
Will GLP-1 eat the emerging world?
Much has been written about the impact of anti-obesity-medications on sectors that have tended to either “cater” to consumption – calorie dense foods (sugary drinks / snacks) – or plied their trade in the economics of treating the effects thereof – bariatric surgery / orthopedics / insulin pumps. To this end, a recent report highlighted the fact that the shift in market value YTD between the new obesity disruptors and their revenue prey has been larger than the $430 bn size of the US drug market.
ReadBlog - October 27th, 2023
Where’s the volatility?
Volatility has been very tame over the past 3-6 months despite political, economic and financial uncertainty. The cost to insure against higher volatility seems relatively low.
ReadBlog – October 20th, 2023
Latam vibes
We were in New York last week for a Latin American conference organized by Brazil’s premier investment bank.
ReadBlog – May 2023
Russia and China’s BRICS economic alliance will fail at countering the West
Published in the Globe and Mail. BRICS was founded in 2009. The group seems to be having a resurgence amid the isolation of Russia after its invasion of Ukraine. Many countries outside the Western orbit, such as Saudi Arabia, Iran and Mexico, have expressed interest in joining.
ReadNewsletter – May 2023
Slow grind
While the Fed keeps the pressure on, the lack of traditional correlations among different assets is making it difficult to predict the economic path and monetary policy. The current state of the financial sector is creating uncertainty. There is a growing gap between the best and worst-performing equities. Despite the risks looming, dispersion is likely to increase further, favoring companies with strong balance sheets and solid earnings. The uncertainty created by US regional banks and cheap valuations abroad are pushing US investors to diversify their portfolios more widely. If inflation and interest rate expectations are peaking, this should start to favor local emerging markets currencies over the USD, usually a key factor for emerging markets outperformance.
ReadSubscribe to our newsletterNewsletter – September 2022
Volatility galore
As with most assets, the performance since the beginning of the year in our investable markets has been negative, with significant daily volatility. In addition to geopolitical turmoil and the lingering effects of the pandemic which have turned into stubborn inflation, market divergences have made us become progressively prudent, while keeping an eye on opportunities. Wage pressures aggravating inflation in developed markets are not as intense in emerging markets. Overall, they are in a different part of the market cycle. Also, tectonic shifts continue in the world of ESG. The onus is on companies to properly disclose their risks and ESG statistics, while assessing them independently remains key.
ReadNewsletter – July 2021
High hopes
Although some equity markets are reaching new records, the euphoria stemming from the discovery of vaccines sadly proved to be short-lived, with countries going through second waves that are in many cases worse than the first. This challenging global picture is in no small part a consequence of the second wave of Covid-19 ravaging Southeast Asian countries, as well as several other regions, some of which had well handled the initial outbreak but are lagging richer countries in their vaccination effectiveness. One of the worst hit was India, cradle of the Delta variant. Other countries facing a larger second wave, such as Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brazil and Peru, have endured market corrections. Lockdown restrictions remain severe in many areas, limiting bank lending, for instance, and growth.
ReadBlog – February 2021
Brazil & Petrobras
The life of an emerging markets fund manager rarely runs smoothly. Sometimes it is as mundane as a stock you own missing your earnings expectations, other times the El Niño may cause a country’s whole economy to be unexpectedly weak. However, when the President of a country does something that causes immediate damage to the economy, what do you do? This week we had one of those moments in Brazil.
ReadNewsletter – February 2021
Onward into the recovery
Economies are reopening across the world. Looking ahead, sentiment remains solid. There is a return of broader economic activity, and those positive developments were before any impact from a vaccine, let alone news of a vaccine. What’s more, credit default swaps suggest that markets see little risk of rollover for the debt issued during the crisis. We therefore think several smaller emerging markets are cheap and that they will re-rate as they post sequentially better results. We have already seen signs of this in Thailand and Indonesia and we still expect that trend to broaden out.
ReadNewsletter – September 2020
Measured risks
Equity markets have clearly been buoyed by all the debt issuance. We have adopted a balanced approach to the “winner-takes-all” conundrum. In August, we started to see the effects of the easing monetary policy wash through into emerging markets of smaller Asian countries and Latin America, as the tsunami of liquidity tries to find a home. Continued USD weakness will support this reflation, not only through higher commodity prices but also the continued possibility of lower domestic rates. This encouraged investors to start picking up several of the laggards and not just the momentum plays. Thus, we are comfortable that we are still in the early stages of this market broadening, and that it will probably be the dominant theme into year end.
ReadBlog – July 2020
Talking to our portfolio
Recently, we were talking to several of the Latin American banks in our portfolio. Now, talking to banks can be less than exciting at times. Across the world, they are heavily regulated, so you get into intense discussions about Basel III, tier 1 capital, and risk weighted models. If you are really lucky, you get to discuss if their net interest margin is going to be 0.305% or 0.310%. Banks can often be the weak link in an economy. As we saw in the global financial crisis, when the system gets infected, it can take years to recover. That is why they receive so much scrutiny. This time around, things were decidedly different.
ReadNewsletter – June 2020
Recovery mode
We are not expecting depression-like conditions that would be caused by a very weak return of commercial and consumer activity resulting in massive permanent job losses. Our scenario remains a constructive one, supported by colossal crisis stimuli by central banks and governments alike and a willingness to become even more proactive with further major fiscal injections. More than 7 trillion USD globally have been committed to relief efforts and more trillions will be injected into the economy to support its recovery. There are other factors at play than a vaccine that can contribute to an appropriate climate for recovery.
ReadNewsletter – March 2020
Panic
Emerging markets never cease to make headlines. What a year it has been. Between the trade war that affected expectations in most countries and the Chinese economic slowdown/rebalancing that was already underway, emerging markets as a whole managed to deliver a return in the high teens in 2019, which was – momentarily, in our opinion – wiped out in the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, as were the returns of most assets globally. The coronavirus problem was taken by the horns after an early public outcry at the sluggishness of unsuspecting authorities. The whole world has ground to a halt, but we think investors can look beyond the present damage. This is a unanimous problem.
ReadBlog – November 2019
Remember, remember the 8th of November
As India marked the 3rd anniversary of Prime Minister Modi’s attack on currency hoarders and tax evaders, we look back at the aftermath of one of the biggest events of demonetization the world has ever seen – leaving over a billion people cash-crunched. Despite the mess that the country went through, there have been improvements in various areas that lay the foundations of a stronger and more economically prosperous India. The country has seen one of the largest financial inclusions globally in recent years.
ReadNewsletter – November 2019
De-risking ahead of uncertainty
While we never expected the trade war scare to materialize into a panic for major corporations, the deluge of (in our opinion, overly) alarmist economic commentators did give most investors the jitters in Q3. Fortunately, before the latest skirmishes and as a routine assessment in line with our four-pronged macroeconomic analysis, we had completed a de-risking of our portfolio. The tilting of allocations away from our higher volatility names in China toward a neutral positioning in that country and an increase in our lower-risk positions in India was effective to provide downside protection in the strategy.
ReadNewsletter – August 2019
A colorful spring
The second quarter was a more challenging one, as the trade war shockingly went nuclear. It wasn’t lost on us that President Trump escalated the tensions to their peak on the very day that Michael Cohen, his ex-lawyer and “fixer”, reported to federal prison to start his three year sentence. This is a volatility phenomenon we have to work with. It has not yet become a structural problem, but currently acts as more of an irritant. The world needs Chinese growth to slow to more mundane levels, and to do so in an orderly way, as it needs to lose its fixation with specific targets that prevent its provincial officials from shedding lower value-add jobs.
ReadNewsletter – May 2019
Our first quarter results
We have completed our first quarter with positive results in line with our targeted risk profile, which is lower than that of the overall market and we think speaks to our disciplined investment process.
ReadBlog – April 2019
Venezuela
Venezuela isn’t somewhere we invest in currently, but it crops up frequently in discussions. Its headline grabbing collapse scares potential investors who worry that other countries will follow suit, that a wave of contagion is about to overwhelm regional peers, thereby spreading misery and poverty in its wake. We try to be clear on this: the current collapse of Venezuela is definitely the end of the last wave, not the beginning of a new one.
ReadNewsletter – January 2019
Our first newsletter
A new chapter has begun at Mount Murray Investment. We are pleased to announce that our firm is now established and actively investing in global public markets. Our mission is simple: create value for our clients through a full market cycle and beyond with investment strategies that are relevant for the future.
ReadBlog – November 2018
Ordem E Progresso
This seems like a good time to remind ourselves about the motto that graces Brazil’s flag – “Order and Progress” – the promise to the Brazilian people. Yet few would say that the dream has been achieved so far. Brazil is all too often dismissed as the country “with a great future behind it”.
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