Emerging markets may offer investors overlooked opportunities as market uncertainty rises. Malcolm Dorson, Global X senior portfolio manager and head of emerging markets strategy, joins Wealth to break down where he sees the most upside right now.
To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Wealth here.
So, how are you looking at these state of markets right now coming off the rally? We've now seen the S&P 500 essentially get back into territory and perhaps on pace to erase some of the losses that we've seen over the course of this year.
Well, thanks for having me, Brad. Uh, big picture, I think investors are incredibly under allocated within emerging markets. We see the average retail investor has roughly 3 to 5% exposure to the asset class. And if you look at what the benchmark says, you should have about 10, 10 and a half percent. An emerging markets make up 25% of global market cap. So people are dramatically under invested coming out of a period of really significant US outperformance. And now that we've reached this period of sort of uncertainty, now the main questions we're getting at are, you know, global ex portfolio consulting group is, people are looking for a second set of eyes saying how do I find diversification? We think emerging markets is a key area.
And so, where within emerging markets are there specific regions that you're looking at?
For sure. Because historically people used to be happy buying the index in emerging markets. Now, if you take a look at it, it's over 80% Asia, about 37% China, 26% state-owned enterprises. There are a lot of areas within EM that people don't want to touch justifiably. But there are also pockets that present a ton of opportunity. So right now we're most excited about, you know, depending on what perspective you want to look at it, but from a long-term structural opportunity, India is a compounding machine. Uh, our fund NDIA has been getting a ton of attention. Uh, from a value perspective that I know a lot of investors, you know, not only want to preserve wealth, but they see that as the best way to to to grow wealth getting in at cheap prices. Greece, Greece trades below book value with a 7% dividend yield and it's now an investment grade sovereign with some of the fastest growth growth in Western Europe. Um, and then in addition to that, we kind of take a look at a contrarian opportunity in Brazil. Brazil just hiked interest rates of 14.75%. It's a powerful carry trade. We think that that is now going to contain inflation. By the end of the year, rates should start coming down. And historically speaking, in Brazilian rate cutting cycles, the average rally has been 96% versus the average drawdown being 17%. So we really like that risk reward setup.
What is the checklist for emerging markets amid geopolitical tensions and a lot of the trade talk that still need to be netted out and formulated into deals that we're all awaiting some of the details around?
Sure. So starting out with trade, we think that coming out of the election and, you know, his first few months as presidency, Trump's all about the deal, the art of the deal, and the way that he approaches things is through sort of anchor an anchor-based negotiation tactic where he really likes to wait to one side or anchor things to one side, starting out with sort of a worst case scenario. And that created a lot of volatility in EM, but it also created windows of opportunity. So whether it was China, Colombia, Mexico, investors who paid attention to this got in quickly and have been able to to to benefit from the upside. So now we're trying to scan this universe and see who's aligned with Trump's policies and where are we going to see a deal next. So we have this 90-day reprieve with China, fantastic. But India is going to be a very interesting opportunity. And we've seen really strong negotiation outcomes coming out of that with JD Vance visiting New Delhi a couple of weeks ago. Uh, we think Argentina with President Malay is very aligned with Trump, uh, that we should see some news coming out from from the Southern Hemisphere as well.