A Preliminary Case For Chile Over Mexico [View article]
Chris,
I'm definitely not the authority on 1982 vs. today, but based on the limited conversations I've had with people who would be the authority on that (i.e., typical Mexicans), there seems to be a begrudging acceptance that at least under the old system of PRI 1.0, things "worked." The thing is, for things to "work" in the 1982 sense of the phrase (a year during which, lest we forget, the Mexican government devalued the peso THREE times and defaulted on its external debt), there was a lot of ugliness going on behind the scenes. And while things may have "worked" better under the old system, there seems to be a similarly begrudging acceptance that there is no going back to that old system, for better or worse. The big question mark is whether PRI 2.0 actually understands that for things to "work" in the modern sense, different inputs are now required. The new government has been paying lip service to this differentiation, saying all the things it knows Americans want to hear it say, but there is as yet absolutely zero evidence that it can and/or will back up its words with actions. All this go-go-Mexico bullishness implicitly assumes that PRI 2.0 will indeed back up its words with actions. I'm not so trusting of this government for too many reasons to list here. Hopefully I'm wrong about them.
A Preliminary Case For Chile Over Mexico [View article]
Thank you again Chris, this is a prime example of what I'm talking about. The article is behind a paywall I do not have access to, but already in the opening excerpt we're seeing exactly the mindless optimism I'm talking about: "Hidden behind the troubling headlines, however, is another, more hopeful Mexico..." -- "hopeful" -- this is important, no doubt. But "hope" doesn't achieve results.
Also in that opening excerpt: "a growing middle class" -- without a doubt one of the most meaningless phrases being thrown around in the discourse about Mexico right now. This is a phrase that has come about to make Americans more comfortable with investing in Mexico by putting the turbulence Mexico is undergoing into some sort of terms Americans can understand (since beheading people as an intimidation tactic is something Americans plainly do not understand, particularly in their own backyard). And again, it's important to make Americans comfortable with investing in Mexico. But that doesn't make the phrase "middle class" in the Mexican context any more meaningful.
A Preliminary Case For Chile Over Mexico [View article]
Ian I completely agree. But this is easier said than done and there seem to be a lot of people overlooking how difficult this is going to be to achieve. Put another way, optimism seems to be trumping realism in a very big way.
A Preliminary Case For Chile Over Mexico [View article]
Chris, agreed. What I find striking though is that expectations for Mexico right now could hardly be any higher. But look closely at some of these bullish stories hyping the Mexican miracle and there are a lot of ifs, coulds, shoulds...basically, forecasts that give the benefit of the doubt at every possible opportunity, when there is actually no real reason to do so. It's almost as if people are wishing the growth story to come true and throwing themselves at the flimsiest of evidence as proof.
The World Bank's IFC Investment Arm In Emerging And Frontier Markets: What We Can Learn [View article]
Thank you for this Jon. The only point I would add for now is to reiterate that there is a massive difference between long-term versus short-term outlooks. What Keitel and the rest of us here are addressing is a longer-term view. But I believe we are in the minority and understanding how the majority (as I perceive it, at least) approaches things is a necessary part of formulating how we communicate our ideas about emerging and frontier markets investing.
The amount of global capital looking for a new home cannot be overstated. One of the big obstacles I have found in interactions with my clients is that the ease with which they are accustomed to moving in and out of positions -- even among the least liquid of assets -- in, say, G8 countries, and now even certain other situations in Mexico, Brazil or South Korea, has acclimated them to a certain level of ease of doing business.
Put another way, the most common conversation I have (still!) with clients has to do with what's happening inside of the current year. Impatient capital like this obviously is not suited for investigating what's happening in less developed markets, even though there are many opportunities in such markets screaming for capital investment. Unfortunately, as I said, I believe this short-term outlook is the majority line, and it is perpetuated every day by a lot of the mainstream financial news outlets, not just on TV, but also online, Seeking Alpha's general content approach being a prime example.
The conundrum here obviously is balancing what customers (readers, investors) say they want versus giving them what we think they should want.
I could go on about this topic, but I think I've said enough for now. Anyway thanks again for getting Seeking Alpha to publish this. I guess it's up to our persistence to build enough of an argument for the majority to consider an alternative course.
I'm passing this interview along right now to everyone I know who should read it, regardless of what they've told me they want.
A Few Thoughts On The Top Frontier Markets' Stock Exchanges Of 2012 [View article]
Abegaz, thanks for your insightful remarks here. I always welcome the opportunity to get more detailed, so let’s get more detailed. My on-the-ground experience in Africa is limited to Ghana and Nigeria. Some of what I’ve seen in both countries echoes what you are seeing outside your home. But other things I’ve seen are not so positive, and stories my clients in those countries have told me (more Nigeria than Ghana), are never exclusively bullish or bearish. There are no doubt opportunities in Nigeria and Ghana, but the least risky way of accessing them, as you rightly point out, is to be physically there, face to face.
Investing in an ETF is not a physically there, face-to-face activity.
Furthermore, many conversations I receive with Western-based players reveal to me serious mismatches in what I see on the ground—not just in Africa, but in many countries considered emerging and frontier markets—and how Western investors formulate their expectations. A simple recent example of this came up in a phone call with an American fund manager I know who was looking at a private equity deal in Mexico (where I am based). A week before he was meant to close on the transaction, one of the assets in question sustained irreparable physical damage as a result of armed violence. Needless to say, this fund manager reneged on the deal, and I suspect he may now unfortunately consider the entire country of Mexico to be off bounds, which it obviously is not. What he did wrong, in a nutshell, was that he looked at the numbers on paper and interpreted them with American risk management standards. He also didn’t have the right people vetting the deal for him on the ground and as a result was asking all the wrong questions when he was conducting his due diligence. Also unfortunate for him was that he didn’t get in touch with me until long after this fiasco had come and gone, or else I could have advised him ahead of time on how to snuff out that something might be amiss.
That’s just one example, and I have many more similar stories in other countries, some African, some not.
To the extent that I have an overwhelming focus on the negative downside risks in this article (which was not what I was trying to communicate by the way, so the fact that that’s all you picked up tells me that I failed on some level), it is merely a reaction to interacting with way too many people who only focus on the upside positive risks without fully understanding what they are getting into. To use your phrase, I seem to attract a lot of Westerners who think it is indeed “all sunshine and roses”, for better or worse.
So it seems that you and I are facing opposite crowds. Without a venue like Seeking Alpha, I cannot imagine how we ever would have been able to share this with each other. But as Jon Springer has very accurately pointed out (here: http://seekingalpha.co...), Seeking Alpha is still quite limited in how it receives submissions regarding the realities of developing economies. So in the meantime we are forced to conform our articles to an editorial format that actually isn’t appropriate at all.
Given your vantage point of living in Africa, Abegaz, I would also recommend you get in touch Nick Pardini, who is running emergingmarketinsider.com and I know would definitely be interested in the perspective of someone who can speak cogently from the standpoint of being physically based somewhere in Africa. Which country are you writing from by the way?
A Few Thoughts On The Top Frontier Markets' Stock Exchanges Of 2012 [View article]
Abegaz, although you sound like a spambot, I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt for the moment and assume there is indeed a human behind this comment. I'm not sure where you got the idea that I've never been to Africa. I have been there on a number of occasions advising clients in a variety of capacities. Admittedly my experience there is not widespread nor as long as my experience in Latin America or Asia. I also have never invested my own money directly in Africa. You can take these facts as a liability in my Africa knowledge in that I cannot speak from the experience of having profited or lost on a direct investment there; or you can consider it an asset that my lack of skin in the game informs better objectivity. The choice is entirely yours and I do not care which view you take.
As for generalities versus specifics, I certainly can get far more specific, but as I make a point to say above, I'm not using this article for digging into local minutiae of specific economies right now. I will do that at a later date. I do it this way because we all are vulnerable to information overload so there has to be a limit to how we apportion information in each successive dissemination. And to get specific later we need to agree on a few overview points first. If you're one of the people already ahead of the game, congratulations on that and I'm sure I speak for everyone when I say we look forward to learning from your experience and your own articles advancing the knowledge on the themes covered here as well as whatever other expertise you have to offer to the rest of us.
A Few Thoughts On The Top Frontier Markets' Stock Exchanges Of 2012 [View article]
Chris, actually I looked at exchange rates while putting this article together and have another chart showing relative performance of the above FX rates but ultimately decided not to include it here for two primary reasons. One, there are already a lot of charts here and I was trying to keep the graphic element a bit under control. Two, many of the FX regimes here are pegged in some form or another; but regardless of FX regime, the currency performance wasn't enough to have a material impact on any of my observations. For example, in some cases, the local currency appreciated against the US dollar in 2012, which actually results in a real growth rate further divergent from USD. In other cases where the local currency depreciated against the USD, it wasn't enough to make a significant enough impact on local stock market performance to take up more space commenting on here.
A Few Thoughts On The Top Frontier Markets' Stock Exchanges Of 2012 [View article]
rcpatrick5443, thanks for your thoughts. If there's anything you can think of that I missed or might consider including in any subsequent discussions on this topic, please do not hesitate to let me know.
Indonesia: A Great Economy To Invest In [View article]
Also, note to Qineqt and the editors, if you want any of us to take your FDI chart seriously, try annotating the axes properly and correcting the information source. As of this writing, the source of the chart info says "Word Bank."
Indonesia: A Great Economy To Invest In [View article]
Sorry, I just realized that it's SA itself that automatically transforms links placed in comments into bitly's. Anyway, I was able to find each of the articles you refer to by searching for their titles with no problem. And if for some reason my bitly doesn't work out, McKinsey Global Institute published a report last month entitled, "The archipelago economy: Unleashing Indonesia's potential", which goes into the upside to Indonesia in much more detail.
Indonesia: A Great Economy To Invest In [View article]
Jakarta expat, thank you very much for filling in the blind spots here but note that your bit.ly links aren't working properly. However, searching for the article titles seems to work out. Also note that the articles you have pointed us to are similarly missing from this recent McKinsey Report: http://bit.ly/SBKh7d
A Street Level View Of Argentina's Economy, The Peso And ARGT [View article]
Sir or madam, given that inflation is privately estimated to be closer to 25-30%, rather than the 8-9% the Kirchner government economists are claiming, I thought food and energy prices would be rather more volatile than what my sources were indicating. So I thank you for the correction and clarification and I sympathize with your need for anonymity.
A Preliminary Case For Chile Over Mexico [View article]
I'm definitely not the authority on 1982 vs. today, but based on the limited conversations I've had with people who would be the authority on that (i.e., typical Mexicans), there seems to be a begrudging acceptance that at least under the old system of PRI 1.0, things "worked." The thing is, for things to "work" in the 1982 sense of the phrase (a year during which, lest we forget, the Mexican government devalued the peso THREE times and defaulted on its external debt), there was a lot of ugliness going on behind the scenes. And while things may have "worked" better under the old system, there seems to be a similarly begrudging acceptance that there is no going back to that old system, for better or worse. The big question mark is whether PRI 2.0 actually understands that for things to "work" in the modern sense, different inputs are now required. The new government has been paying lip service to this differentiation, saying all the things it knows Americans want to hear it say, but there is as yet absolutely zero evidence that it can and/or will back up its words with actions. All this go-go-Mexico bullishness implicitly assumes that PRI 2.0 will indeed back up its words with actions. I'm not so trusting of this government for too many reasons to list here. Hopefully I'm wrong about them.
A Preliminary Case For Chile Over Mexico [View article]
Also in that opening excerpt: "a growing middle class" -- without a doubt one of the most meaningless phrases being thrown around in the discourse about Mexico right now. This is a phrase that has come about to make Americans more comfortable with investing in Mexico by putting the turbulence Mexico is undergoing into some sort of terms Americans can understand (since beheading people as an intimidation tactic is something Americans plainly do not understand, particularly in their own backyard). And again, it's important to make Americans comfortable with investing in Mexico. But that doesn't make the phrase "middle class" in the Mexican context any more meaningful.
A Preliminary Case For Chile Over Mexico [View article]
A Preliminary Case For Chile Over Mexico [View article]
The World Bank's IFC Investment Arm In Emerging And Frontier Markets: What We Can Learn [View article]
The amount of global capital looking for a new home cannot be overstated. One of the big obstacles I have found in interactions with my clients is that the ease with which they are accustomed to moving in and out of positions -- even among the least liquid of assets -- in, say, G8 countries, and now even certain other situations in Mexico, Brazil or South Korea, has acclimated them to a certain level of ease of doing business.
Put another way, the most common conversation I have (still!) with clients has to do with what's happening inside of the current year. Impatient capital like this obviously is not suited for investigating what's happening in less developed markets, even though there are many opportunities in such markets screaming for capital investment. Unfortunately, as I said, I believe this short-term outlook is the majority line, and it is perpetuated every day by a lot of the mainstream financial news outlets, not just on TV, but also online, Seeking Alpha's general content approach being a prime example.
The conundrum here obviously is balancing what customers (readers, investors) say they want versus giving them what we think they should want.
I could go on about this topic, but I think I've said enough for now. Anyway thanks again for getting Seeking Alpha to publish this. I guess it's up to our persistence to build enough of an argument for the majority to consider an alternative course.
I'm passing this interview along right now to everyone I know who should read it, regardless of what they've told me they want.
A Few Thoughts On The Top Frontier Markets' Stock Exchanges Of 2012 [View article]
Investing in an ETF is not a physically there, face-to-face activity.
Furthermore, many conversations I receive with Western-based players reveal to me serious mismatches in what I see on the ground—not just in Africa, but in many countries considered emerging and frontier markets—and how Western investors formulate their expectations. A simple recent example of this came up in a phone call with an American fund manager I know who was looking at a private equity deal in Mexico (where I am based). A week before he was meant to close on the transaction, one of the assets in question sustained irreparable physical damage as a result of armed violence. Needless to say, this fund manager reneged on the deal, and I suspect he may now unfortunately consider the entire country of Mexico to be off bounds, which it obviously is not. What he did wrong, in a nutshell, was that he looked at the numbers on paper and interpreted them with American risk management standards. He also didn’t have the right people vetting the deal for him on the ground and as a result was asking all the wrong questions when he was conducting his due diligence. Also unfortunate for him was that he didn’t get in touch with me until long after this fiasco had come and gone, or else I could have advised him ahead of time on how to snuff out that something might be amiss.
That’s just one example, and I have many more similar stories in other countries, some African, some not.
To the extent that I have an overwhelming focus on the negative downside risks in this article (which was not what I was trying to communicate by the way, so the fact that that’s all you picked up tells me that I failed on some level), it is merely a reaction to interacting with way too many people who only focus on the upside positive risks without fully understanding what they are getting into. To use your phrase, I seem to attract a lot of Westerners who think it is indeed “all sunshine and roses”, for better or worse.
So it seems that you and I are facing opposite crowds. Without a venue like Seeking Alpha, I cannot imagine how we ever would have been able to share this with each other. But as Jon Springer has very accurately pointed out (here: http://seekingalpha.co...), Seeking Alpha is still quite limited in how it receives submissions regarding the realities of developing economies. So in the meantime we are forced to conform our articles to an editorial format that actually isn’t appropriate at all.
Given your vantage point of living in Africa, Abegaz, I would also recommend you get in touch Nick Pardini, who is running emergingmarketinsider.com and I know would definitely be interested in the perspective of someone who can speak cogently from the standpoint of being physically based somewhere in Africa. Which country are you writing from by the way?
A Few Thoughts On The Top Frontier Markets' Stock Exchanges Of 2012 [View article]
A Few Thoughts On The Top Frontier Markets' Stock Exchanges Of 2012 [View article]
As for generalities versus specifics, I certainly can get far more specific, but as I make a point to say above, I'm not using this article for digging into local minutiae of specific economies right now. I will do that at a later date. I do it this way because we all are vulnerable to information overload so there has to be a limit to how we apportion information in each successive dissemination. And to get specific later we need to agree on a few overview points first. If you're one of the people already ahead of the game, congratulations on that and I'm sure I speak for everyone when I say we look forward to learning from your experience and your own articles advancing the knowledge on the themes covered here as well as whatever other expertise you have to offer to the rest of us.
A Few Thoughts On The Top Frontier Markets' Stock Exchanges Of 2012 [View article]
A Few Thoughts On The Top Frontier Markets' Stock Exchanges Of 2012 [View article]
Mexico - South Of The Border Growth Dynamo [View article]
Indonesia: A Great Economy To Invest In [View article]
Indonesia: A Great Economy To Invest In [View article]
Indonesia: A Great Economy To Invest In [View article]
A Street Level View Of Argentina's Economy, The Peso And ARGT [View article]