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Richard Jones and Rizi Mohanty from FSSA Investment Managers discuss the silver lining in Asia Pacific markets in a Q&A.

Learn more about investing in Asia Pacific equities with FSSAIM today. Our APAC investment funds are invested for sustainable, long term growth.

FSSA Investment Managers has been investing in Asia and global emerging markets for three decades.

As the world continues to lurch from Covid-surges to reflexive and localised lock-downs, everybody is now looking through to a mythical status quo ante bellum – the before-Covid-times, when the world was just hunky-dory.

Markets will always do their best to push us to act in a short-term and emotional manner, particularly at times when events become somewhat extreme. These days all of us, market participants or not, seem almost entirely focused on uncertainty rather than promise. This is why having a strong philosophy and process is crucial.

As Asian countries become richer, they have been transitioning towards consumption-based economies, translating higher per capita income into increased spending across goods and services.

Many people seem to think that money management is about predicting the future. But even with the gift of perfect foresight, the subsequent market reaction to news is often far from obvious.

Every downturn is different – the Global Financial Crisis and the Asian Financial Crisis were primarily debt-related, while SARS and Covid are obviously health-related, with a knock-on effect on growth and consumption.

Looking back (though it’s not like we didn’t already know), it is clear that we have been living in an increasingly distorted world. Financially, for the last decade, it has been about interest rates falling to (and staying at) zero in a world of general money printing.

Though Covid hasn’t yet finished with us, the markets have finished with Covid. In real life, there is still plenty of misery to go around, but in our opinion things have seldom been better for investors.

Fund Manager Q&A

In our last client update, written through the depths of Covid-despair, we observed that real life and the world of markets are seldom so intimately entwined. With markets swinging violently to the downside on a riptide of fear, it was clear even then that activity was being driven by short-term anxiety rather than a real evaluation of Asia’s longer-term value-accretion prospects.

As many economies have bounced back from the worst of the pandemic, concerns about central banks, the rate of money-printing and inflation have returned. Markets have responded to the arrival of better times by selling off bonds and bond-like equities.

In response to the recent client interest around China’s stock market and the challenging performance year-to-date, we had a conversation with Martin Lau, managing partner and lead portfolio manager to a number of Asia Pacific and Greater China equity strategies.

Operating as an autonomous investment team within First Sentier Investors group, we are a team of dedicated investment professionals based in Hong Kong and Singapore.