Emerging Markets Debt

The Emerging Markets Debt Strategy aims to outperform its blended benchmark (50:50 JP Morgan Hard Currency: Local Currency GBI EM GD/EMBI GD) by 1.5% p.a. (gross) and produce a long term positive total return. It is managed by a talented, highly experienced team of five investors and one dedicated trader. The team also leverage TT’s wider ecosystem consisting of twelve EM Equity experts, five traders and sixteen additional investment professionals.  

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Emerging Markets Debt

EM Debt as an asset class has grown and matured over the years, with EM economic fundamentals improving markedly. In many cases, fundamentals are akin to – or even better than – those in Developed Markets, meaning the asset class is becoming increasingly mainstream. Against this backdrop, access to information has proliferated and Emerging Markets have become more efficient, meaning outperformance based solely on fundamental analysis is increasingly challenging.

In our view, this new paradigm suits truly active, nimble and contrarian processes that focus on overlooked, mispriced areas of the market. With this shifting backdrop in mind, we built our EM Debt process around a number of key convictions and areas of differentiation:

  • We do not treat EM Debt as a homogenous asset class, but rather a mosaic of sub-asset classes with different alpha drivers and catalysts. We have four risk buckets: sovereign credit; corporate credit; FX; and rates.
  • We are non-regional in our approach. Our strategies are truly active and global, rather than simply representing passive stacking of regional strategies.
  • We are value-based contrarian investors.

  • We only focus on areas where we believe we have an edge. In the sovereign and corporate credit buckets, our focus is on specific inflection points with a contrarian mindset. In the FX and rates buckets, we focus on flows and the investor base. Local investors have become an increasingly sophisticated and important holder group in both local and hard currency EM markets. They have different perceptions of risk/reward, as well as varying regulatory requirements. We look to exploit differences in behaviour between various types of investors.
  • We focus on overlooked, mispriced and under-researched markets and engage in selective high-conviction trades.
  • We rely on a scenario-assessment and odds, rather than clearcut directional views. Instead of believing that we have more accurate macro data or forecasts than the wider market, we study the consensus and positioning, aiming to identify behavioural biases or market ‘blind spots’, where certain scenarios are overlooked because of entrenched beliefs.
  • We rigorously separate alpha from beta, aiming to focus on pure idiosyncratic alpha trades. These alpha trades are clearly identified in the portfolios, with sponsorship and accountability.
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