Los mercados emergentes en su conjunto se han quedado muy baratos…
Midiendo Ratio PER Shiller (cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings ratio) del MSCI Emerging Markets ha pasado de:
2011: 37 veces beneficios
2016: 10 veces beneficios
Pero incluso el PER de China (donde invierten los extranjeros a través de las acciones H de Hong Kong (^HSCE), su PER es de menos de 7 veces beneficios…
PIMCO, una de las mayores gestoras del mundo, avisa de lo interesante que se han puesto de precio:
Pimco Adviser Sees ‘The Trade of a Decade’ in Emerging Markets
Emerging-market assets are so cheap that they may be “the trade of a decade,” according to Research Affiliates LLC, a sub-adviser to Pacific Investment Management Co., one of the world’s biggest money managers.
They’re joining a growing number of investors, including BlackRock Inc., Franklin Templeton and Goldman Sachs Asset Management, who are turning bullish on emerging markets after three years of underperformance. With borrowing costs at the highest levels since the depths of the global financial crisis, traders are being compensated for challenges ranging from falling commodity prices to China’s economic slowdown, BlackRock said Tuesday.
“The exodus from emerging markets is a wonderful opportunity -- and quite possibly the trade of a decade -- for the long-term investor,” Christopher Brightman, chief investment officer at Research Affiliates, said in a post on Pimco’s website Wednesday. “We are increasingly confident of our positioning in emerging market stocks and bonds.”
Developing-market securities accounted for 35 percent of the Pimco All Asset Fund and 39 percent of the Pimco All Asset All Authority as of Dec. 31, according to Brightman, who is based in Newport Beach, California. The two funds, managed by Rob Arnott who co-founded Research Affiliates in 2002, had combined assets of about $29 billion at the end of January, data compiled by Bloomberg show.
‘Exceptionally Cheap’
Brightman said emerging-market stocks are “exceptionally cheap” after MSCI Inc.’s benchmark gauge declined 30 percent over the past three years.
He pointed out that the so-called Shiller P/E Ratio, a measure of valuation based on cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings ratio, fell to 10 in January. There have been only six times when the measure has dipped below 10 over the past 25 years. In the following five years, the stocks rallied an average 188 percent, according to Brightman, who oversaw the endowment at the University of Virginia before joining Arnott’s Research Affiliates.
High Return
“From the rear-view mirror, the bear market in emerging markets has been painful,” Brightman wrote in the post. “When we look out of the windshield, however, these very asset classes offer the highest potential returns available to today’s opportunistic investor.”
The MSCI Emerging Markets Index fell 0.1 percent at 12:41 p.m. in Hong Kong. The gauge trades at 1.3 times net assets, near its lowest level in seven years. Benchmark measures of Chinese, Brazilian and Russian shares all trade below price to book.
Arnott, who developed the two funds for Pimco in 2002 and 2003, helped pioneer what he calls fundamental indexing, an approach designed to limit risk and beat benchmarks over the long haul by favoring undervalued assets.
The contrarian approach hasn’t been successful in recent years, partly because assets in developing countries continued to decline. The $20 billion All Asset Fund lost 11 percent over the past year through Feb. 23, compared with a decline of about 7 percent in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index on a total return basis.
Value Stocks
Brightman said in the post that the recent underperformance of value-oriented stocks has been unusual.
Value stocks have lagged their growth-focused peers by more than 5 percent annually over the past three years through 2015, a rare occurrence since 1997, according to Brightman. When it did happen, the relatively cheaper value companies returned 6.7 percent more than growth equities annually in the following three years.
This history demonstrates that asset prices tend to converge to their long-term average, a strategy his company pursues, Brightman said.
“It is a manifestation of a core tenet of our investment philosophy: the largest and most persistent active investment opportunity is long-horizon mean reversion,” he wrote.
Otros que lo ven muy barato:
EM Stocks Are Just Plain Cheap
Regardless of the valuation metric one chooses to look at it, the story is the same: Emerging Market stocks are cheap.
EM stocks have fallen so far that 2009 valuation lows are starting to be challenged. Case in point, on a price to cash flow basis EM stocks are trading at lower multiple today than they were in 2009 (granted just a hair lower). This is important because EM stocks are doing a better job than ever in creating free cash flow. The GKCI EM Index is currently trading at a juicy 11.82% free cash flow yield.
On a price to sales, price to book value, and price to earnings basis, 2009 valuation lows are still in place but current valuation multiples aren’t too far off. In 2009, EM stocks hit a price to book value level of 0.89x, currently its trading at 0.91x book value. In 2009, EM stocks were trading at 0.56x sales. Today, it trades at 0.68x sales. Finally, in 2009 price to earnings multiples hit a low of 5.99x. Today, EM stocks trade at 7.95x earnings.
EM stocks understandably remain out of favor for most investors. However, they have been out of favor for so long that finally a valuation argument can be made for dipping back into EM equities
Abrazos,
PD1: El consumo sigue tirando en China. Se está produciendo un cambio de país especializado en producir barato, a país consumidor de lo que sea…
China´s economy may be slowing, but consumers haven´t stopped spending.
China’s economy may be slowing down, even though consumers haven’t stopped spending. Internal migration trends that are often hidden from government statistics may partly explain the conundrum.
The Chinese consumer seems oblivious to the broader state of the economy. Whereas gross domestic product growth in China has fallen from 7.9 percent two years ago to 6.9 percent in the past quarter, retail sales growth has held firm at about 11 percent. Although sales growth of big-ticket items such as cars has been relatively modest, spending on smaller items and services such as movie tickets and mobile phone subscriptions has increased at a breakneck pace (see chart 1).
There are many explanations for the consumer’s resilience. China’s government is actively promoting policies to shift its economy toward consumption. Income per capita is rising, and the middle class is growing, driven by urbanization, which typically involves the movement of populations from rural areas to coastal cities.
But urbanization is a two-way street. In fact, we at AB believe that some of the strength in Chinese spending can be explained by people moving back to smaller cities after trying their luck in the large tier-1 cities, such as Shanghai and Beijing, where migrant workers often discover that life isn’t easy.
Beyond the bright lights of the big city, housing is very expensive, so workers often live in rundown neighborhoods with long commutes to work. Some welcome government incentives to look for opportunities back in third- and fourth-tier cities, where lower wages are offset by a lower cost of living, so disposable income remains the same or improves. These trends often fall below the radar of official government statistics that nourish the markets.
For example, take the story of Lin, a 24-year-old from Mianyang, a tier-3 city of 4.5 million, in Sichuan province. Lin’s parents moved to Shanghai seeking better education, health care and income. Their higher incomes were reflected as part of a trend that further widened the urban-rural disposable income gap (see chart 2).
When Lin followed his parents to Shanghai, however, he found that work was a struggle. He told us that he lived in a poor area, left home at 4 a.m. to commute to work and didn’t return until 9 in the evening. And he didn’t really fit in culturally with his new Shanghai acquaintances.
PD2: Desde AFi, Emilio Ontiveros dice:
La inclusión de la moneda china supone en realidad un reconocimiento de la envergadura y proyección internacional de esa economía, y un apoyo a la voluntad reformista de sus autoridades.
La moneda china entrará en la cesta de monedas con la que se configuran los Derechos Especiales de Giro (DEG), la unidad de cuenta que utilizaba el Fondo Monetario Internacional (FMI). Hasta ahora eran cuatro las que ocupaban esa liga especial de las monedas más ampliamente utilizadas como denominadores del comercio y flujos de capital, pero sobre todo como monedas de reserva: el dólar de EEUU, el euro, el yen y la libra esterlina. Los DEG o SDR, por sus iniciales en inglés, son a su vez el principal activo de reserva del FMI.
Nació en 1969, como un apoyo al régimen de tipos de cambio fijos pero ajustables vigente hasta 1971, como un activo de reserva, adicional a los dominantes hasta entonces: el oro y el dólar estadounidense. De esta forma, las reservas oficiales necesarias para cualquier país socio del FMI, con el fin de mantener el tipo de cambio de su moneda mediante intervenciones en los mercados de divisas, se veían enriquecidas por ese nuevo activo de reserva, por esa nueva «divisa».
Bueno, en realidad no se trata de una nueva moneda, sino de un derecho a utilizar las divisas de los países miembros. Los socios del FMI pueden cambiar DEG por las monedas de cualquier otro socio. Se trata, en definitiva, de un «activo suplementario» de reserva. Pero también de una unidad de cuenta del propio FMI y de alguna otra organización multilateral.
El valor inicial fue equivalente a 0,888671 gramos de oro fino, que era el valor oficial de conversión comprometido para un dólar de EEUU. Pero esa paridad duró hasta que el dólar perdió su convertibilidad en oro, en el verano de 1971. A partir de entonces, la composición inicial fue por las cinco monedas con mayor volumen transaccional. Efectivamente, a los pocos años del nacimiento de los DEG, el régimen cambiario establecido en el verano de 1944 en Bretton Woods saltaba por los aires al romperse el compromiso estadounidense de garantizar la convertibilidad del dólar en oro y, consecuentemente, también se truncó el régimen de tipos de cambio original. La flotación de los tipos de cambio de las monedas en los mercados de divisas acabó siendo el sustituto de las reglas. Los DEG pasaron a ser una cesta de monedas. El valor de un DEG en términos de dólares de EEUU sigue siendo determinado diariamente pero ya sobre la base de los tipos de cambio de mercado de cada una de las porciones de las cuatro monedas frente al dólar.
La virtualidad de ese activo de reserva artificial era cada día menor. La expansión de los flujos internacionales de capital al amparo de una creciente y extensiva liberalización limitó el carácter de los activos de reserva. Ya no era necesario «atesorarlos»: podrían captarse en unos mercados financieros cada día más amplios y profundos, a los que podían acceder un número creciente de países.
Solo en los últimos años, tras los problemas de liquidez internacional que emergieron a partir de la crisis de 2008, el FMI volvió a hacer una nueva asignación de DEG, hasta 180.000 millones, con el fin de suministrar liquidez internacional y reforzar las posiciones de reservas de los países socios.
La composición de esa cesta se revisa cada cinco años por el FMI atendiendo a la importancia de las monedas en la escena comercial y financiera global. En la última, en noviembre de 2010, se revisaron los pesos de cada una de ellas. Ahora se amplía la cesta. El peso de la moneda china será del 10,9% superando la ponderación del yen (8,3%) y la libra (8,1%), pero sensiblemente por debajo del dólar (41,7%) y el euro (30,9%). La nueva composición será efectiva desde octubre de 2016.
La decisión es relevante desde una perspectiva fundamentalmente política. Dada la escasa relevancia que ese activo de reserva tiene en la escena financiera global, la inclusión de la moneda china supone en realidad un reconocimiento de la envergadura y proyección internacional de esa economía. Y un apoyo a la voluntad reformista de sus autoridades. La significación política es tanto mayor si tenemos en cuenta que la moneda china no es del todo convertible, ni los movimientos internacionales de capital que pueden llevar a cabo sus residentes, completamente libre. Pero es probable, me atrevo a anticipar, que esta decisión facilitará esas reformas. En definitiva, la completa integración internacional de la segunda economía más importante del mundo. Y con ella, la puesta de largo de su moneda, de su estatus global
PD3: Interesante video de un asesor del Banco Central Chino hablando sobre expectativas: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2016-02-26/chinese-economy-is-not-as-bad-as-it-looks-huang
PD4: ¡Que nuestro ejemplo de vida sea la biblia de los ateos…!
