February was a bumpy month for investors and markets. Interest rates climbed higher in the US, Europe and Australia, the benchmark Dow Jones Industrials stock index shed over 4%, inflation numbers for January disappointed and Sino-US tensions climbed a notch. But the month did end on another positive note: Chinese factory output is growing at its fastest pace since 2012.
EPFR, the industry leader in providing fund flows and asset allocation data to financial institutions globally, unveils its new brand identity with a refreshed website, logo and mission statement.
Despite China’s first steps away from the zero-Covid policies that have sapped its economy and some optimistic forecasts for 2023, investors tapped EPFR-tracked Emerging Markets Equity Funds for $2.4 billion – a 13-week high outflow – in early December 2022.
The fate of China’s Evergrande, the second-largest developer in China by sales, could have a knock-on effect on China’s real estate sector and the international markets, in what doomsayers have warned could well be another Lehman moment for financial markets.
Our latest technical paper discusses China as an asset class from the perspective of the EPFR China Flows and Positioning datasets. China Share Class Allocations (CSCA) is the latest in a progression of datasets offered by EPFR that shed light on China, stretching back to Emerging Markets Equity Fund flows in 1995.
In the previous quants corner piece released in May, Chinese Share Classes: Getting past the letter A, we noted the increasing allocation by active fund managers to Hong Kong listed Chinese securities (H shares, Red chips and P chips) and, as a result, the steady drop in their underweight relative to the benchmark.
The new monthly dataset by EPFR, first of its kind, provides granular insight into all nine China Share Classes, meeting investor demand and expanding EPFR’s dataset coverage.
