At the turn of the century, investing in China was viewed as a risky proposition. Foreign access to a notoriously volatile, retail-driven equity market was heavily restricted. The lack of a credible regulatory framework and legal protections deterred US venture capitalists from making direct investments in Chinese companies. In many cases, Chinese banks and the country’s fledgling private equity industry also balked. So, when Chinese technology firm Alibaba received its first $25 million investment from Goldman Sachs in 1999, investors sat up and took notice.
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Quants Corner: Energy funds in a time of war
This blog will examine the impact the conflict between Russia and Ukraine has had on global energy markets and the calls investors have made during 2022.
Quants Corner: Retail flows | The wisdom of “dumb money”
In this blog, we utilize some of EPFR’s oldest strategies to test the predictive powers of the retail flows captured in the universe of 150,000 mutual fund and ETF share classes encompassing some $47 trillion in AUM that EPFR tracks on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.
Quants Corner: Separating the wheat from the chaff in China
Of the $82 billion that investors committed to all EPFR-tracked Emerging Markets Equity Funds through the first 10 months of 2022, three-quarters found its way into dedicated China Equity Funds.
Quants Corner: Hong Kong and Singapore: A tale of two cities
Four months after the Covid-19 pandemic swept across the world, China imposed a new national security law on Hong Kong.
Quants Corner: Making the jump from relative to linear
Until now, the majority of the strategies developed and back tested by EPFR’s Quant Team have been based on the concept of selecting and rotating between different markets or asset classes.
Quants Corner: Bear Markets – before they in the trash can
For several years EPFR has, periodically, published an internally developed indicator to detect whether or not current conditions are consistent with previous bear markets.
Quants Corner: Inflation is on the rise. So is fear
Driven by supply chain, labor market and energy supply issues, consumer prices are surging at a rate last seen in the 1970s and 1980s. To what degree this could have been foreseen is the subject of increasingly acrimonious debate.
Quants Corner: Treading carefully along the frontier
MSCI developed the classification of country equity stock markets based not only on how advanced, economically, the country is, but also how easy it is for global investors to access its domestic stock market. While most people are familiar with developed and emerging markets, the top two levels, they may not know much about the third, frontier markets.
Quants Corner: Seeking balance in an underused fund group
Balanced Funds, also known as hybrid or multi-asset funds, are a class of funds that contain both a debt and equity within a single portfolio. These funds offer investors diversified exposure that can be adjusted over time — either on a discretionary basis or in response to predetermined markers — and are an important tool for target-date retirement planning.