Asset Allocation & Fund Positioning, Copley Fund Research

Steven Holden

Steven Holden is the CEO and Founder of Copley Fund Research, an independent provider of research on equity fund positioning and performance.  Set up in 2014, Copley focuses on global, global emerging market, US, Asia Ex-Japan and China active equity funds, covering over $4tr in assets across 1300 active managers.  The company provides data and analysis on market trends, manager exposures and active fund performance to an audience of investment managers, pension funds and fund selectors worldwide.  Mr Holden’s 14-year investment banking career started in 2000, where he worked for Morgan Stanley as an equity derivative trader focused on emerging markets in London.  Following this, he spent 4 years at Citibank in London and Hong Kong as an Executive Director in derivative sales, focused again on emerging markets.

Asset Allocation & Fund Positioning

Global Emerging Markets:  Unloved Stocks

Copley Fund Research

Copley Fund Research provide research and data on asset allocation among Global and Emerging Market equity funds.  The analysis details absolute and relative positioning across countries, sectors and industries together with highly granular data on single stock and single fund allocations.  The data is updated monthly with time series going back to January 2011.

Global Research - Analysis of 165 prominent Global equity funds, combined AUM $335bn
GEM Research - Analysis of 127 prominent global EM equity funds, combined AUM $250bn

Asset Allocation - Global and GEM Equity

Cross Asset Strategy

Multiple Countries / Cross Asset Strategy

In this report, we screen for stocks that are largely avoided by global emerging market active funds. We identify companies within the MSCI Emerging Markets Index that are held underweight by EM active funds and by less than 3% of the active fund population.To test whether avoiding these stocks has been a good strategy, we create an 'EM Unloved' portfolio that contains all the stocks from the screen, rebalanced monthly and back-tested over the last 7 years.The results show a significant underperformance of EM Unloved stocks against the benchmark MSCI EM Index, and avoiding these stocks has clearly played a part in the long-term outperformance of EM active funds against the benchmark.  With an average of 26% of the MSCI EM index largely avoided by active EM investors, it questions the logic of broad-based index strategies when it comes to emerging market exposure.

In this report, we screen for stocks that are largely avoided by global emerging market active funds. We identify companies within the MSCI Emerging Markets Index that are held underweight by EM active funds and by less than 3% of the active fund population.To test whether avoiding these stocks has been a good strategy, we create an 'EM Unloved' portfolio that contains all the stocks from the screen, rebalanced monthly and back-tested over the last 7 years.The results show a significant underperformance of EM Unloved stocks against the benchmark MSCI EM Index, and avoiding these stocks has clearly played a part in the long-term outperformance of EM active funds against the benchmark.  With an average of 26% of the MSCI EM index largely avoided by active EM investors, it questions the logic of broad-based index strategies when it comes to emerging market exposure.

Samsung Electro Mechanics Co, Ltd. (009150 KS)

EM Managers: Most Avoided Stocks - 2018 Update