Global Investing

Indian equities are among the best emerging markets performers this year, with the Mumbai market having posted its best January rise since 1994. That’s quite a reversal from last year’s 24 percent slump. The bet is faltering economic growth will force the central bank to cut interest rates from a crippling 8.5 percent. So, how safe is the rally?

Some conditions are already in place. Valuations look decent after last year’s drop. There has been a surge in global investors’ appetite for emerging market assets. So Apurva Shah, who helps manage $600 million at the BNP Paribas Mutual Fund in Mumbai, expects positive returns from Indian stocks this year. But for a decent rally to be sustained, interest rates have to fall in order to kickstart faltering growth, he says.

The risk is really the assumption that interest rates and inflation are actually on the way down. We’ve seen the first leg of that happening, but it’s just the beginning. Rates are still way too high. To trigger off any real revival in economic growth they need to fall a lot more.

The market may be pricing Indian interest rates to fall between 75 to 100 basis points this year but there is little indication this will actually happen. The central bank, the most hawkish in the developing world, has cut reserve requirements and voiced concern about growth. But a senior central bank official has made clear only a sustained fall in inflation will prompt a rate cut.

Inflation is indeed easing but elevated food prices, infrastructure bottlenecks, and the government’s seeming inability to cut back on budget spending mean the battle is not over yet.  Shah says that for the time being he is sticking to long positions in consumer stocks with a domestic focus, including consumer banking companies, and shying away from rate-sensitive stocks such as state-controlled wholesale banks. That will change if rates actually start to fall.

We just finished our three-day Reuters 2012 Global Investment Outlook summit in London, New York and Hong Kong, where prominent money managers have discussed their outlook for next year. (For more click here)

Deutsche Bank Private Wealth Management (whose official was also a guest at the summit) is telling its clients the following 10 investment themes for next year.

1. Safe may not be safe Don’t react to uncertainty by automatically taking refuge in traditional safe havens such as cash, sovereign bonds, real estate or precious metals as they may prove less safe than they appear.

It’s just over a month until everyone winds down for a Christmas break — this means the season for the 2012 outlook briefings by various managers is starting.

Among the first I went to was ING Investment Management, which held the briefing this morning. Eric Siegloff, global head of strategy and tactical allocation, reckons the next year’s key theme affecting asset classes is summarised as CCC — crisis, contagion and credibility.

He believes 2012 is going to be an uncertain environment with the crisis in the banking system and the foundations of the euro zone threatening to spread beyond EU (contagion), hitting credibility of policymakers.

No longer an idle “what if” game, investors are actively debating the chance of a breakup of the euro as a creditor strike  in the zone’s largest government bond market sends  Italian debt yields into the stratosphere — or at least beyond the circa 7% levels where government funding is seen as sustainable over time.  Emergency funding for Italy, along the lines of bailouts for Greece, Ireland and Portugal over the past two years, may now be needed but no one’s sure there’s enough money available — in large part due to Germany’s refusal to contemplate either a bigger bailout fund or open-ended debt purchases from the European Central Bank as a lender of last resort.

So, if Germany doesn’t move significantly on any of those issues (or at least not without protracted, soul-searching domestic debates and/or tortuous EU Treaty changes), creditor strikes can reasonably be expected to spread elsewhere in the zone until some clarity is restored. The fog surrounding the functioning and makeup of the EFSF rescue fund and now Italian and Greek elections early next year  — not to mention the precise role of the ECB in all this going forward — just thickens. Why invest/lend to these countries now with all those imponderables.

Where it all pans out is now anyone’s guess, but an eventual collapse of the single currency can’t be ruled out now as at least one possible if not likely outcome. The global consequences, according to many economists, are almost incalculable. HSBC, for example, said in September that a euro break-up would lead to a shocking global depression.

So it’s not just investors who are guilty of moving in a herd-like fashion.

Financial journalists use the same verbs and nouns with greater frequency as stock markets overheat but display more variety in their phraseology after the bubble bursts, a study by Irish computer scientists has shown.

Trawling through nearly 18,000 on-line news articles that mention the Dow Jones, FTSE and Nikkei stock indices between 2006 and 2010, Aaron Gerow of Trinity College Dublin and Mark Keane of University College Dublin found that the language used by the writers had become more similar in the run-up to the global financial crisis.

Bit of fun, this -- and might raise some issues about returning to the Gold Standard. The S&P 500 stock index priced in gold (thanks to Reuters graphics whiz Scott Barber):

There is little doubt that the latest U.S. earnings season has been a good one for long-equity  investors. Thomson Reuters Proprietary Research calculates that with 67 percent of S&P 500 companies having reported, EPS growth -- both actual and that still forecast for those who have not filed yet -- has come in at 36 percent.

Furthermore, a large majority of the reports have surprised on the upside, as they like to say on Wall Street.  Some 75 percent of  reports have been better than expected.  Not surprisingly, the S&P index gained around 6.9 percent in July and is up another 1.7 percent in the first two trading days of August.

But given what looks like at least a faltering U.S. economy with little consumer confidence, some analysts  have begun asking what there is to get excited about. Philipp Baertschi, chief strategist at wealth manager Bank Sarasin, for example, calls it a case of micro bulls versus macro bears and warns that it won't last.

Globalisation is evident in this graphic put together by James Bristow, a global equities portfolio manager at BlackRock. It shows the correlation between the U.S. S&P stock index and counterparts in Europe, Australasia and the Far East.

Basically, what happens these days on Wall Street is matched everywhere else, or vice versa.

It is a bit of a problem for long-term investors. One of the best ways to diversify used to be to buy outside your domestic market. Not so now. This is likely to push more institutional investors to non-correlated assets and hedge funds.

It was Chuck Prince, former CEO of Citigroup, who famously said on July 9, 2007: “When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still standing.”

Little did he know the music did nearly stop for Citi with its shares tumbling to less than $2 in 2009 from $55 in 2007.

A year later, worldwide reflation from huge liquidity injection and stimulus packages helped the global economy from collapsing.  The music may have started. The question is, should investors return to the dance floor?

“Sell in May and go away” — a strategy that implies that taking a good summer holiday is the best way to deliver returns — may seem like an out-dated axiom by which to manage a share portfolio, but research from S&P indicates that using a strategy this decade would have paid dividends.

Analysing the monthly performance of 16 European markets over the 10 year period from January 2000 to December 2009, S&P shows that the summer months are inauspicious for investing.

Germany saw an average total return 0f 3.3 percent over the January to May period compared with an average loss of 1.4 percent over the June to August summer months, and a total return of 8.9 percent for the year as a whole, S&P says.