Global Emerging Markets Opportunities
Overview
Fund managers James Syme, Paul Wimborne, and Ada Chan believe emerging markets go right or wrong at the country level. Their experience is that emerging markets tend to have wide variation of economic, political and social conditions and investors need to understand these before investing in companies in those countries.
Competitive Advantage
The team believes that the combination of an assertively top-down, country-driven approach to assessing and selecting stocks is a significant differentiating factor from many of their peer group. Combining this process with the team’s considerable experience in investing in the emerging markets will maximise portfolio exposure to country-level opportunities such as macro-economic and political improvements.
Investment Team
James Syme, (Senior Fund Manager) and Paul Wimborne (Senior Fund Manager) joined J O Hambro to launch the JOHCM Global Emerging Markets Opportunities strategy in June 2011 and were joined by Ada Chan as an analyst in 2011, before she was promoted to be a fund manager in January 2022. This strategy uses the same investment philosophy, style and process that the team used to great effect at their previous employer, Baring Asset Management (Barings).
James and Paul joined Barings in November 2006 and together managed the firm’s Global Emerging Market strategy until December 2010. During this time, the strategy delivered strong performance against both the benchmark and their peers, ranking in the upper quartile of competitor universes (source: eVestment Alliance as at 31 December 2010).
Investment Philosophy & Process
For James, Paul and Ada identifying the right countries in which to invest is the most important influence on investment performance. Through an extensive process that focuses on growth, liquidity, currency, management/politics and valuations, they produce country allocation targets for each of the 21 countries within the MSCI Emerging Markets Index. Complementing their top-down view is a stock selection process that focuses on identifying quality growth stocks within their favoured countries. The result is a large-cap biased portfolio of typically 50-60 stocks.
Portfolio Construction
The top-down, country-driven approach means that the strategy takes significant relative risk with country positioning, whilst the focused portfolio (40-60 stocks compared with over 800 in the index) means that it has additional relative risk at the stock level. The Team ensure that these relative risks are sufficiently diversified.
