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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TobagoJack who wrote (29154)	2/5/2008 8:54:34 PM
From: Arran Yuan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 219433

A Happy, Healthy and Wealthy Year of 4706 to you and yours dearly, TJ!

To: TobagoJack who wrote (29154)	2/6/2008 2:29:00 AM
From: elmatador	Respond to of 219433

If the case for investing in emerging Europe -- countries including Russia, Eastern Europe and Turkey -- was good before the recent two-day meltdown in world stock markets, it is even better now. Emerging Europe on the map Barry Critchley, Financial Post Published: Wednesday, January 23, 2008 If the case for investing in emerging Europe -- countries including Russia, Eastern Europe and Turkey -- was good before the recent two-day meltdown in world stock markets, it is even better now. So says Ghadir Abu Leil-Cooper, the head of the five-person emerging-Europe equity team at London-based Baring Asset Management, a firm that manages about $53-billion for clients, of which about $5-billion is invested in emerging Europe. "Companies which were trading at P/E multiples of six and seven which are growing at 15% a year are now that much cheaper," said Leil-Cooper, in Canada this week talking to potential investors. "Bottom up, we have a very strong investment case and the market will give you that opportunity to invest because of what is happening globally. It really is the ABC of what we do," said Leil-Cooper, who said this week's decline "is not noise." "The sell-off is telling us that there is something occurring in the U.S. economy that markets are pricing. But [as an investment manager] you look for investment opportunities that have opened up because all the markets sold off in sync with each other," said Leil-Cooper, who hails from the Middle East, attended the University of Durham, graduated with PhD in particle physics, and has been managing money in the City of London for more than a dozen years. In her view, and despite the linkages between the world's stock markets as demonstrated this week, there are companies in that part of the world that are experiencing growth that is domestically driven. She mentions companies in Russia that are the beneficiaries of strong infrastructure spending and investment in commodities, and companies in Poland that are the recipients of piles of cash from the European Union, all part of a plan to bring that country up to the standards enjoyed by Western Europe. "You invest in change, in those situations which go from worse to better. That's where you get the return," she said. As well, she said good investments can be found in those companies that have strong cash flows and that aren't dependent on external financing. "And [as investment managers] we look for companies which have been punished," said Leil-Cooper, whose firm recently landed a sub-advisory role from Excel Funds Management for the Excel Emerging Europe Fund. (Excel said the fund is the first of its kind that's offered to Canadian retail investors. The fund, launched last month, is the first Canadian mutual fund managed by Baring. Its assets are about $10-million, Excel says. Baring manages about $3-billion for Canadian institutional clients. Part of Leil-Cooper's thesis is that while the markets have shown their linkage, the economies of emerging Europe and the United States are less linked than they were. She produces a graph that shows the linkage -- as measured by the so-called R squared --is now about half what it was a few years back. (Of late it's been 0.4 versus 0.7.) In Leil-Cooper's assessment, "the emerging economies will take some of the brunt of the slowdown in the U.S. economy because they are industrializing and urbanizing." The top Excel holdings are Gazprom, Sberbank Rossii, Vimpel Communications, Mobile Telesystem, Lukoil Holdings, Novatek, Sistema JSFC, Norilsk Nickel and Mechel (all Russian), and Akbank (Turkey). In all, 64.1% of the assets are in Russia; 10.1% in Turkey and 8.1% in Poland.