Emerging Markets: the love story
It is Valentine’s day and emerging markets are certainly feeling the love. Bank of America/Merrill Lynch‘s monthly investor survey shows a ‘stunning’ rise in allocations to emerging markets in February. Forty-four percent of asset allocators are now overweight emerging market equities this month, up from 20 percent in January — the second biggest monthly jump in the past 12 years. Emerging markets are once again investors’ favourite asset class.
Looking ahead, 36 percent of respondents said they would like to overweight emerging markets more than any other region, with investors saying they would underweight all other regions, including the United States. Meanwhile investor faith in China has rebounded with only 2 percent of investors believing the Chinese economy will weaken over the next year, down from 23 percent in January. China also regained its crown of most favoured emerging market in February.
Last year, the main EM index plummeted more than 20 percent as emerging assets fell from favour. So what is the reason for this renewed passion in 2012?
Firstly December’s LTRO — a multi-billion euro liquidity arrow from the cupids at the ECB has revived investor appetite for riskier emerging assets, boosting the index to around six-month highs since the start of the January. A second significant factor behind the resurgence in risk sentiment is that the market is daring once again to hope for an improvement in global growth, says Gary Baker, BofAML Global Research head of European equities strategy.
The big beneficiaries of all this have been emerging markets. It’s not just about liquidity. Clearly the actions of the ECB have been vitally important… but what you’ve also seen is an improvement in global growth optimism. If optimism over growth is improving then there may well be a more fundamental underpinning to the movement.
So is investors’ new-found love for emerging assets a passing flight of fancy or a true sign of commitment?
The significant monthly improvement in market sentiment towards emerging markets and the 44 percent level of investors overweight emerging markets are both events which have historically coincided with short-term underperformance by emerging equities, Baker says.
Rebasing investors’ confidence
Interesting change by State Street in its monthly sounding of its institutional investor clients. The firm has gone back over all its data and rebased it in order to get an indicator that not only marks up and down changes in investor confidence but also suggests what regime investors are in. Ken Froot, the Harvard professor who co-developed the index, describes the move thus:
“We have revised the Investor Confidence Index to provide a better guide as to the level of risk tolerance. Specifically, we have rebased the index so that a level of 100 is ‘neutral’: readings above this level tell us that institutional investors are increasing their allocations to risky assets, while readings below 100 indicate that institutional investors are reducing such allocations.”
So what does this month tell us? The global index is now at a 10-month high, having risen every month since December. But according to the new rebased reading, it has only been in territory that indicates the buying of risky assets for the past two months.
The optimist would say this means investors are only just warming up. The pessimist that they have only been recovering from an overshoot.
Reuters Funds Summit: Kingdom for a horse
Anyone expecting investors to start galloping back into riskier assets in a rush might have something of a wait, according to Kathleen Hughes, who runs money funds for JPMorgan Asset Management in Europe. They are more likely to wander back in.
“Risk appetite returns in stages. It leaves on a horse but comes back on foot,” she rather neatly told a Reuters funds summit being held in Luxembourg.
There are nonetheless some signs around that show leather is getting some wear. Fund trackers EPFR Global says that although overall fund flows fell during the second week of March, there were some signs of growing risk appetite. Commodities, technology and energy sector funds as well as global emerging market equity and non-Japan Asia funds all saw net inflows.
Perhaps most noteworthy, money market funds, the bellwether for investor risk aversion, had net outflows of $381 billion in the week.
Hughes says she has seen something of the same. The size of the safest-of-safe segment of her money markets funds — the short-dated U.S. Treasury paper bit — has halved since the fourth quarter of 2008.
So there is some walking going on even if the horse remains in the stable.
(Reuters photo: Ilya Naymushin)
