To All, CEF thoughts. I've been looking at the charts. Fair warning, they have some drawbacks. If you don't add in cap gain distributions, you get results skewed way to the negative. Anyhoo, running the charts and then looking at pe ratios, country cefs are not as cheap as I had thought. They look like they fell off a cliff in the past three years, but, for the past 5 years, most are still above their 1997 price levels.
PE ratios are not as low as I'd prefer either, even for the bowwows (my favorite group). It surprised me to find that Turkish Investment Fund is still selling at 26 times eps. India Fund at 22 times. These are huge pe ratios in any historic period other than the recent bubble.
Cheaper funds that are also down on their luck include South Africa, 15 times, and Israel, 16 times. Cheap but on a tear include China (CH) at 14 times and Korea (KF) at 15 times.
The lesson: though I still like buying down and out CEFs, especially when they are also selling at discounts to NAV, this is not as cheap a period as I would have thought at first glance. The bloat of US valuations has certainly found its way around the world. I still hate the buck, so that makes them a good deal, but they are not begging for buyers as they were in the late 80s. |
