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I do read Mobius' comments with interest around the various Emerging Market topics including his blog and info/insight around his EM country visits but his Templeton diversified EM funds are very mediocre---actually poor.
From the Marketwatch article in the OP - here's an interesting comment by a user on that article that had me chuckling.....
*** "I have been an investment consultant here in São Paulo, Brasil for the past 10 years and have seen Mobius in action. He drops in on Brasil about once every 6 months in his private jet, clad in a white linen suit and phony panama straw hat with his fake tan. Stays in the most expensive hotel in town, eats three outrageously expensive meals, and in 36 hours is back on his jet to some other "emerging market". All of the local rags drool over his every word, and diligently report his "thoughts and findings" about the local market the next day. All this at his clients expense. Guy is a charlatan. Snake-oil salesman of the worst type. Pumper and dumper to the nth degree.
Check out his results here: ... http://www.franklintempleton.co.uk/ft/funddetails?fundNumber=0806. Since launch, his fund has returned less than 50% of a simple MSCI Emerging Markets Fund, while charging over 2.5% per year. Anyone investing with this buffoon is asking for negative performance... Abraços from Brasil" ***
1. He looks like an old-fashioned Bond villain, thus I have previously called him "BRICFinger."
2. His mutual funds are extremely aggressive - if it's a good year for EM, the funds will likely do well. If it's not, they are going to be at the bottom of the pack. The funds are inconsistent and almost more short-to-mid term trading vehicles than long-term investments. I think given his history in EM, he continually is called upon as the media/CNBC/Bloomberg face of EM investing - are his funds among the best in the asset class? No - but until some other EM investor comes along the media can latch onto...
3. Edited to add: added a little more to DEM etf today.
I also like DEM as well partly because of the higher yield and bit of a value tilt. This ETF now has a solid $2.5B in assets. And it has done well since inception especially when you compare it to the other top EM funds.
Back to Mobius - I do want to add to what I said earlier....his EMF cef (Templeton Emerging Markets), however, has done quite well over the past 5 and 10 years. In fact, it did really reall over the past 5 years compared to some of the top EM funds.
Reply to @Kenster1_GlobalValue: EMF - I think - has done well because it's less aggressive (and I'm guessing - haven't looked in detail - probably more consistent) than his other funds, including top 10 holdings in PT Astra International and Dairy Farm, both of which are majority owned by Jardine Matheson (which I own). Templeton Dragon, another CEF run by Mobius, has Dairy Farm as 14% of the fund. While past returns certainly DO NOT guarantee future results, Dairy Farm is a more conservative EM play - and lost less than 1% in 2008 (m*)
Reply to @scott: Yes top 10 holdings of EMF as of 11/30/2011:
BRILLIANCE CHINA AUTOMOTIVE HOLDINGS LTD 10.2% VALE SA 5.8% PT ASTRA INTERNATIONAL TBK 4.8% PETROLEO BRASILEIRO SA (PETROBRAS) 4.6% AKBANK TAS 3.8% DAIRY FARM INTERNATIONAL HOLDINGS LTD 3.8% BK CENTRAL ASIA 3.7% TATA CONSULTANCY SERVICES LTD 3.7% BANCO BRADESCO SA 3.4% PETROCHINA CO LTD 3.3%
EMF also has around 15% in Preferred Stock --- all of it in Brazil last time I looked.
So it's good that he is keeping an eye on valuations as mentioned in the article:
*** “I may like a certain sector, but if the companies are not cheap I’m not interested,” Mobius said. “I’d love to buy consumer companies in China, but many of them are very expensive.”
So Mobius looks elsewhere for similar plays. “I may go to Brazil and buy a food company that’s cheaper and still has the growth characteristics,” he said. ***
Here's the EMF country allocation:
ASIA 69.0% ...CHINA 21.0% ...HONG KONG 6.3% ...INDIA 8.9% ...INDONESIA 9.0% ...PAKISTAN 1.8% ...SOUTH KOREA 5.7% ...THAILAND 9.8% ...TURKEY 6.5% EUROPE 11.1% ...AUSTRIA 0.9% ...HUNGARY 1.0% ...POLAND 0.1% ...RUSSIA 7.0% ...UNITED KINGDOM 2.0% LATIN AMERICA 19.3% ...BRAZIL 17.1% ...MEXICO 2.2% MID-EAST/AFRICA 0.6% ...SOUTH AFRICA 0.6% TOTAL EQUITY* 100.0%
EMF has indeed done quite well, but it is the outlier among the other diversified EM funds that Mobius manages which have had underwhelming performance, including TEDMX, TABRX, TEMMX, and TFMAX.
My EM equity exposure mainly comes from ECON, BIP, and JSHLY (thanks again Scott).
Reply to @kevindow: Thankfully, Jardine continues to hold up nicely, although I just continue to regard it as a very long-term hold (although I will not be adding any more to it at this point.) Otherwise, DEM/DGS are newer EM holdings for me, as is BRAQ, and some other pre-existing EM exposure (Janus Overseas and others.)
Reply to @scott: The daily trading volume of JSHLY has really picked up over the past few months, which makes this thinly traded stock a little more liquid. BRAQ looks interesting as a multi-cap play on the Brazilian consumer, but it has very low daily trading volume for an ETF. Thanks for sharing your EM exposure.
Reply to @kevindow: JSHLY has thankfully become a bit more heavily traded, although it remains interesting to see things that are so heavily traded in various foreign markets get so little interest in the US market (Genting Singapore - which I don't own - trades an average of 58M shares in Singapore. The pink sheet in the US trades an average of a few thousand.)
Today, van Agtmael remains bullish on what everyone now calls emerging markets.
"As a group, they're now as attractive as I have seen them, on both a historic and comparative basis, at any time in the last 25 years," says van Agtmael, who oversees $7.4 billion in emerging-markets equities at Ashmore EMM LLC in Arlington, Virginia. He's looking in particular at shares of companies in China and the Middle East.
{...}
Thailand scored well because it's attracting investors with its agricultural wealth and industrious workforce. Peru, which has grown an average of 5.7 percent annually during the past decade, will benefit from a surge in consumer spending across South America, says Mark Mobius, who oversees about $45 billion as executive chairman of San Mateo, California-based Templeton Emerging Markets Group. He has been buying Peruvian shares.
Comments
http://mobius.blog.franklintempleton.com/2012/01/12/the-year-that-was-and-the-year-to-come/#more-1329
I do read Mobius' comments with interest around the various Emerging Market topics including his blog and info/insight around his EM country visits but his Templeton diversified EM funds are very mediocre---actually poor.
Templeton Developing Markets Fund --- Poor Performance:
https://www.franklintempleton.com/retail/app/product/views/fund_page.jsf?fundNumber=711
From the Marketwatch article in the OP - here's an interesting comment by a user on that article that had me chuckling.....
***
"I have been an investment consultant here in São Paulo, Brasil for the past 10 years and have seen Mobius in action. He drops in on Brasil about once every 6 months in his private jet, clad in a white linen suit and phony panama straw hat with his fake tan. Stays in the most expensive hotel in town, eats three outrageously expensive meals, and in 36 hours is back on his jet to some other "emerging market". All of the local rags drool over his every word, and diligently report his "thoughts and findings" about the local market the next day. All this at his clients expense. Guy is a charlatan. Snake-oil salesman of the worst type. Pumper and dumper to the nth degree.
Check out his results here: ... http://www.franklintempleton.co.uk/ft/funddetails?fundNumber=0806. Since launch, his fund has returned less than 50% of a simple MSCI Emerging Markets Fund, while charging over 2.5% per year.
Anyone investing with this buffoon is asking for negative performance...
Abraços from Brasil"
***
2. His mutual funds are extremely aggressive - if it's a good year for EM, the funds will likely do well. If it's not, they are going to be at the bottom of the pack. The funds are inconsistent and almost more short-to-mid term trading vehicles than long-term investments. I think given his history in EM, he continually is called upon as the media/CNBC/Bloomberg face of EM investing - are his funds among the best in the asset class? No - but until some other EM investor comes along the media can latch onto...
3. Edited to add: added a little more to DEM etf today.
Back to Mobius - I do want to add to what I said earlier....his EMF cef (Templeton Emerging Markets), however, has done quite well over the past 5 and 10 years. In fact, it did really reall over the past 5 years compared to some of the top EM funds.
BRILLIANCE CHINA AUTOMOTIVE HOLDINGS LTD 10.2%
VALE SA 5.8%
PT ASTRA INTERNATIONAL TBK 4.8%
PETROLEO BRASILEIRO SA (PETROBRAS) 4.6%
AKBANK TAS 3.8%
DAIRY FARM INTERNATIONAL HOLDINGS LTD 3.8%
BK CENTRAL ASIA 3.7%
TATA CONSULTANCY SERVICES LTD 3.7%
BANCO BRADESCO SA 3.4%
PETROCHINA CO LTD 3.3%
EMF also has around 15% in Preferred Stock --- all of it in Brazil last time I looked.
So it's good that he is keeping an eye on valuations as mentioned in the article:
***
“I may like a certain sector, but if the companies are not cheap I’m not interested,” Mobius said. “I’d love to buy consumer companies in China, but many of them are very expensive.”
So Mobius looks elsewhere for similar plays. “I may go to Brazil and buy a food company that’s cheaper and still has the growth characteristics,” he said.
***
Here's the EMF country allocation:
ASIA 69.0%
...CHINA 21.0%
...HONG KONG 6.3%
...INDIA 8.9%
...INDONESIA 9.0%
...PAKISTAN 1.8%
...SOUTH KOREA 5.7%
...THAILAND 9.8%
...TURKEY 6.5%
EUROPE 11.1%
...AUSTRIA 0.9%
...HUNGARY 1.0%
...POLAND 0.1%
...RUSSIA 7.0%
...UNITED KINGDOM 2.0%
LATIN AMERICA 19.3%
...BRAZIL 17.1%
...MEXICO 2.2%
MID-EAST/AFRICA 0.6%
...SOUTH AFRICA 0.6%
TOTAL EQUITY* 100.0%
Hi Kenster,
EMF has indeed done quite well, but it is the outlier among the other diversified EM funds that Mobius manages which have had underwhelming performance, including TEDMX, TABRX, TEMMX, and TFMAX.
My EM equity exposure mainly comes from ECON, BIP, and JSHLY (thanks again Scott).
Kevin
The daily trading volume of JSHLY has really picked up over the past few months, which makes this thinly traded stock a little more liquid. BRAQ looks interesting as a multi-cap play on the Brazilian consumer, but it has very low daily trading volume for an ETF. Thanks for sharing your EM exposure.
http://mobius.blog.franklintempleton.com/2012/01/25/rise-of-the-dragon/
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-08/china-lone-bric-among-top-emerging-markets.html
Today, van Agtmael remains bullish on what everyone now calls emerging markets.
"As a group, they're now as attractive as I have seen them, on both a historic and comparative basis, at any time in the last 25 years," says van Agtmael, who oversees $7.4 billion in emerging-markets equities at Ashmore EMM LLC in Arlington, Virginia. He's looking in particular at shares of companies in China and the Middle East.
{...}
Thailand scored well because it's attracting investors with its agricultural wealth and industrious workforce. Peru, which has grown an average of 5.7 percent annually during the past decade, will benefit from a surge in consumer spending across South America, says Mark Mobius, who oversees about $45 billion as executive chairman of San Mateo, California-based Templeton Emerging Markets Group. He has been buying Peruvian shares.