Global Investing

There seems to be no end to the rip-roaring bond rally across emerging Europe.  Yields on Turkish lira bonds fell to fresh record lows today after an interest rate cut and stand now more than a whole percentage point below where they started the year.

True, bonds from all classes of emerging market have benefited from the flood of money flowing from central banks in the United States, Europe and Japan, with over$20 billion flowing into EM debt funds since the start of 2013, according to EPFR Global. Flows for the first three months of 2013 equated to 12 percent of the funds’ assets under management.

But the effect has been most marked in emerging European local currency bonds — unsurprising, given economic growth here is weakest of all emerging markets and central banks have been the most pro-active in slashing interest rates.  Emerging European yields have fallen around 50 basis points since the start of the year, compared to a 20 bps average yield fall on the broader JPMorgan index of emerging local bonds, Thomson Reuters data shows.

The IMF today advised Poland to continue cutting rates “without delay” to boost the economy. That should give another leg-up to zloty bonds, where short-dated yields are already at record lows.

The flows have also been a boon to troubled countries such as Hungary that might otherwise have scrabbled for money. Instead, Budapest had by end-April fulfilled more than 65 pct of its 2013 funding needs and has since indicated it might not need to tap international bond markets again this year.

So, it’s May and time for the annual if temporary equity market selloff, right? Well, maybe – but only maybe.  A fresh weakening of the global economic pulse would certainly suggest so, but central banks have shown again they are not going to throw in the towel in the battle to reflate. The ECB’s interest rate cut today and last night’s insistence from the Fed that it’s as likely to step up money printing this year as wind it down are two cases in point. And we’re still awaiting the private investment flows from Japan following the BOJ’s latest aggressive easing there.

So where does that all leave us? A third of the way through 2013 and it’s been a good year so far for nearly all bulls – both western equity bulls and increasingly bond bulls too! Not only have developed world equities clocked up some 13 percent year-to-date (the S&P500 set yet another record high this week while Europe’s bluechips recorded a staggering 12th consecutive monthly gain in April) , but virtually all bond markets from junk bonds to Treasuries, euro peripherals to emerging markets are now back in the black for the year as a whole. For the most eyebrow-raising evidence, look no further than last week’s debut sovereign bond from Rwanda at less than 7 percent for 10 years or even newly-junked Slovenia’s ability this week to plough ahead with a syndicated bond sale reported to already be in the region of four times oversubscribed. For many people, that parallel rise in equity and bonds smells of a bubble somewhere. But before you cry “QEEEEE!” , take a look at commodities — the bulls there have been taken a bath all year as data on final global demand hits yet another ‘soft patch’ over the past couple of months.

So is this just an idiosyncratic random walk of asset markets (itself no bad thing after years of stress-riven hyper correlation) or can we explain all three asset directions together? One way to think of it is in terms of global inflation. If QE-related inflation fears have been grossly exaggerated then pressure to remove monetary stimulus or wanes again and there may even be arguments – certainly in Europe – for more. This would intuitively explain the renewed dash for bonds and fixed income in general even in the face of the still-plausible, if long term, “Great Rotation” idea. You could argue the monetary free-for-all is buoying equities regardless of demand concerns. But why wouldn’t commodities gain on that basis too?

Emerging markets bear John-Paul Smith first made his call to underweight emerging equities at the end of 2010. In a note released late on Monday he points out that such a position would have paid off handsomely — since end-2010 emerging equities have underperformed MSCI’s World index by 27.5 percent and U.S. MSCI by 37.6 percent.

Smith, who is head of emerging equity strategy at Deutsche Bank, sees no reason to change his call. Reckoning that the cyclical heyday of emerging markets is past, he is advising clients to hold on to developed and U.S. equities at the expense of emerging markets. The reason? China, pivotal for the rest of the EM world for commodities, trade.

Smith writes:

We are maintaining our existing underweight recommendations for GEM versus DM/US and current country weightings within GEM because the ongoing structural deterioration in the sustainable growth rate of the Chinese economy will continue to be the dominant narrative for the GEM equity asset class, in our view. Since the start of the year it has been increasingly evident at the micro level that the massive increase in total corporate financing has not as yet fed through into anything resembling a commensurate pickup in final demand.

Where is the Japanese money? Mostly it has been heading back to home shores as we wrote here yesterday.

The assumption was that the Bank of Japan’s huge money-printing campaign would push Japanese retail and institutional investors out in search of yield.  Emerging markets were expected to capture at least part of a potentially huge outflow from Japan and also benefit from rising allocations from other international funds as a result.  But almost a month after the BOJ announced its plans, the cash has not yet arrived.

EM investors, who seem to have been banking the most on the arrival of Japanese cash, may be forgiven for feeling a tad nervous. Data from EPFR Global shows no notable pick-up in flows to EM bond funds while cash continues to flee EM equities ($2 billion left last week).

The jury may be out on whether Messrs. Abe and Kuroda will succeed in cajoling the Japanese economy from its decades-long funk but the cash is betting they will. Domestic and foreign investors have stampeded for Tokyo equities, and Morgan Stanley has been crunching the numbers.

Since 2005, Japanese investors built up a 14 trillion yen (over $140 billion) portfolio of foreign equities. But between January-March 2013, they offloaded a third of this — about $39 billion.  Going back to July 2012 when they first started bringing cash home, the Japanese have sold $53 billion in foreign equities, or 36 percent of equity holdings.

If one were to include all foreign portfolio investments, they sold a net $74 billion worth of assets in the first three months of 2013. Morgan Stanley says this is the the most since 2005. You can see their graphic below (click on it for a bigger version).

Well, I think we’ve successfully put to bed the idea that there’s any structural shift from bonds to equities going on (see here, here and here). Maybe time to look a little more closely at the numbers to pull out some more discrete swings in allocations.

We’ve just published the latest data on mutual fund and ETF flows from Lipper and there are, as ever, some clues. The snapshot of our interactive graphic below shows flows into and out of bond funds during March. You can click on the image to access the full graphic, or just click here.

One notable trend, and it represents a continuation from last month too, is the move away from corporate debt funds.

Indians have reacted to the latest gold prices falls by — buying more gold. And why not? Aside from Indians’ well known passion for the yellow metal (yours truly not excluded) gold has by and large served well as an investment: annual returns over the past five years have been around 17 percent, Morgan Stanley notes.

Now, gold’s near 20 percent plunge this year has wiped some $300 billion off Indians’ gold holdings, Morgan Stanley estimates in a note (households are believed to own about 15,000 metric tonnes of gold). So is the gold rush in India over?

Possibly. Indian gold imports have doubled to around 3 percent of GDP in the past five years. That rise is partly down to greater wealth which translates into more wedding jewellery purchases. But the more unpleasant side of the equation is India’s inflation problem. Look at the following charts from MS that shows how negative real interest rates have encouraged savings in gold rather than financial instruments:

Asian equity markets tend to be casualties of weak yen. That has generally been the case this time too, especially for South Korea.

Data from our cousins at Lipper offers some evidence to ponder, with net outflows from Korean equity funds at close to $700 million in the first three months of the year. That’s the equivalent of about 4 percent of the total assets held by those funds. The picture was more stark for Taiwan funds, for whom a similar net outflow equated to almost 10 percent of total AuM. Look more broadly though and the picture blurs; Asia ex-Japan equity funds have seen net inflows of more than $3 billion in the first three months of the year, according to Lipper data.

Analysts polled by Reuters see more drops ahead for the yen which they predict will trade around 102 per dollar by year-end (it was at 77.4 last September). Some banks such as Societe Generale expect a 110 exchange rate and therefore recommend being short on Chinese, Korean and Taiwanese equities.

There’s cash in that trash.

Analysts at Bank of America/Merrill Lynch are expounding opportunities to profit from the burgeoning waste disposal industry, which it estimates at $1 trillion at present but says could double within the next decade. They have compiled a list of more than 80 companies which may benefit most from the push for recycling waste, generating energy from biomass and building facilities to process or reduce waste. It’s an industry that is likely to grow exponentially as incomes rise, especially in emerging economies, BofA/ML says in a note:

We believe that the global dynamics of waste volumes mean that waste management offers numerous opportunities for those with exposure to the value chain. We see opportunities across waste management, industrial treatment, waste-to-energy, wastewater & sewage,…recycling, and sustainable packaging among other areas.

There is no denying there is a problem. Around 11.2 billion tonnes of solid waste are produced by the world’s six billion people every day and 70 percent of this goes to landfill. In some emerging economies, over 90 percent is landfilled.  And the waste mountain is growing. By 2050, the earth’s population will reach 9 billion, while global per capita GDP is projected to quadruple. So waste production will double by 2025 and again from 2025 to 2050, United Nations agencies estimate.

As CalPERS considers switching all of its portfolios to passive investing,  questioning the effectiveness of active equity investment, there have been some interesting findings that would stir up the active vs passive debate.

Researchers at Cass Business School find that equity indexes constructed randomly by “monkeys” would have produced higher risk-adjusted returns (ie return adjusted by measuring how much risk is involved in producing that return) than an equivalent market capitalisation-weighted index over the last 40 years.

How does this work? Using 43 years of U.S. equity data, researchers programmed a computer to randomly pick and weight each of the 1,000 stocks in the sample, effectively simulating the stock-picking abilities of a monkey.The process was repeated 10 million times over each of the 32 years of the study.  Nearly all 10 million indices weighted by chance delivered vastly superior returns to the market cap approach. Andrew Clare, co-author of the paper, says: