Author: Cris

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What Glaxo’s India offer says about EM affiliates

Any investor familiar with emerging markets will be aware that often find partly-owned subsidiaries and affiliates of major multinationals with their own listing on the local stock exchanges. For example, Unilever has listed divisions in India, Indonesia and Pakistan, while Wal-Mart owns Wal-Mex (Mexico) and Massmart (South Africa)

The reasons why these subsidiaries are publicly traded varies, although it sometimes reflects local rules that at some point prohibited foreign companies from being the sole owner of a local company. Where these rules have changed, the local listings can often look like an anachronism today, especially given that many of them are lightly traded.

So one might expect the shareholders in the stocks to jump at the parent multinational’s offer to buy them out at a premium. Which makes it interesting to see what’s going on with GlaxoSmithKline’s bid to increase its stake in its Indian affiliate, GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Healthcare.

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Brief Asean Trading Link update

An article in AsianInvestor on the Asean Trading Link provides a few snippets on how the service is going so far – the story will probably disappear behind the paywall soon, so the main points are:

Bourses in Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand are gauging investor interest in trading ETFs, structured products and Islamic bonds via the recently established Asean Trading Link.

This makes sense – the exchanges need to ensure the link evolves and with the other three countries (Indonesia, Philippines and Vietnam) unlike to join soon, they need to find ways to grow it through their own efforts.

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Updates

Fee changes at OCBC and DBS

There are a couple of updates to fees at two Singapore brokers. OCBC Securities has slightly reduced its commissions on the higher tiers for Singapore stock trades – trades S$50-100k are now 0.22% from 0.275% and trades above S$100k are now 0.18% from 0.20%. This brings it in line with most of its local peers for online Singapore trades.

It’s a small change, but at least it’s in the client’s favour. DBS Vickers appears to have gone in the opposite direction. A reader has pointed out some significant alterations to the firm’s fee schedule for some international markets. (These apparently came in a little while ago, but neither I nor anyone I know uses DBS, so I wasn’t aware of it until now.)

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News

New EM Exposed index from Stoxx

Index provider Stoxx announced an interesting new benchmark – the Stoxx Global 1800 EM Exposed Index. In brief, this is a sub-index of its Stoxx 1800 Global Index (which holds 1,800 developed world stocks) focusing on companies that get a substantial portion (at least 33%) of their revenues from emerging markets.

The press release [PDF] has a bit more detail, as does the index data page on the Stoxx site (although there isn’t much data up yet). Conceptually, this is pretty similar to the Russell Geographic Exposure Index series launched in September.

In both cases, the idea is that you can get exposure to EM growth through developed world stocks that offer better liquidity, corporate governance and other desirable factors. It’s a fairly popular theme and with two related indices launched in the last few months there’s a good chance that we will see an exchange-traded fund based on it sooner or later.

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News

China and corruption in context

An interesting working paper called “Is Corruption in China ‘Out of Control’? A Comparison with the US in Historical Perspective” came out at the beginning of December. It’s worth reading the whole thing, but the succinct abstract does a good job of summarising it for those in a hurry.

This paper compares corruption in China over the past 15 years with corruption in the U.S. between 1870 and 1930, periods that are roughly comparable in terms of real income per capita. Corruption indicators for both countries and both periods are constructed by tracking corruption news in prominent U.S. newspapers. Several robustness checks confirm the reliability of the constructed corruption indices for both countries. The comparison indicates that corruption in the U.S. in the early 1870s — when it’s real income per capita was about $2,800 (in 2005 dollars) — was 7 to 9 times higher than China’s corruption level in 1996, the corresponding year in terms of income per capita. By the time the U.S. reached $7,500 in 1928 — approximately equivalent to China’s real income per capita in 2009 — corruption was similar in both countries. The findings imply that, while corruption in China is an issue that merits attention, it is not at alarmingly high levels, compared to the U.S. historical experience. The paper further argues that the corruption and development experiences of both the U.S. and China appear to be consistent with the “life-cycle” theory of corruption — rising at the early stages of development, and declining after modernization has taken place. Hence, as China continues its development process, corruption will likely decline.

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News

Iraq gets ready for biggest IPO

For those of us who like to monitor frontier markets, a Reuters piece on the forthcoming IPO of Iraqi telecom group Asiacell is worth reading for a bit of background on the state of the market there.

Obviously, Iraq is a fairly tricky investment for foreign individuals, although DUTrade mentioned a while ago that it is interested in adding to its multimarket Middle East and North Africa platform at some point. There are of course English-speaking local brokers – Rabee Securities seems to be the one most commonly featured in articles in the world media, although I have no idea whether they accept foreign individual clients.

Whether the country is a sensible investment is another matter – resource-heavy frontier markets tend to be very prone to boom and bust and Iraq obviously has specific problems of its own. But there are a handful of specialised funds investing there – the Babylon Fund is probably the best known. (As usual in these kinds of vehicles, minimum investments sizes tend to be high – for understandable reasons, they’re not really geared to the retail investor taking a small punt on something exotic.)

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News

New quality indices from MSCI

“Quality” is clearly a popular theme among nervous equity investors at the moment, so it’s not surprising to see that MSCI has just launched a series of quality indices. The press release [PDF] and methodology [PDF] give more details, but essentially the components are screened on three factors: High return on equity, stable earnings and low financial leverage.

This is what most investors would consider to be a simple standard definition of quality, as opposed to the two obvious comparison indices: Société Générale’s new-ish Global Quality Income Index (which is a somewhat more complicated combination of the Piotroski score and the Merton distance-to-default model) and the older Standard and Poor’s S&P 500 High Quality Rankings Index, which is based on stability and growth of earnings and dividends (and in my view doesn’t seems to provide a very satisfactory quality filter).

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Winding up the Chinese B share market

It’s rare that anything interesting happens in China’s moribund B share market, but the last couple of weeks have been an exception – even if all the developments point to it no longer existing in the relatively near future.

Owing to China’s capital controls, there are several different types of stock listings used by Chinese companies. To recap quickly:

  • A shares are mainland-incorporated Chinese companies listed on the mainland Shanghai and Shenzhen exchanges and are denominated in renminbi. They can only be bought by mainland Chinese investors and a very limited number of qualified foreign institutional investors.
  • B shares are mainland-incorporated Chinese companies listed in Shanghai and Shenzhen and are denominated in US dollars (in Shanghai) and Hong Kong dollars (in Shenzhen). They can be freely bought both by foreigners and by mainland investors with foreign currency accounts.
  • H shares are mainland-incorporated Chinese companies listed in Hong Kong. They can be freely bought by foreigners.
  • Red chips are companies controlled by the Chinese state, but legally incorporated outside mainland China and listed in Hong Kong. Again, they can be freely bought by foreigners.
  • P chips are companies controlled by private sector Chinese businessmen that are legally incorporated outside mainland China and listed abroad. Usually, P chip is used to mean specifically Hong Kong listed stocks, with S chip being used for private firms listed in Singapore and (less commonly) N share for US-listed Chinese companies and L share for London-listed Chinese companies.
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Updates

Fidelity markets update

Fidelity now appears to gone live with the eight additional markets they announced they would be adding earlier this year – there doesn’t seem to have been any official announcement of this, but the exchanges, currencies and commissions are now listed on the international trading pages of their website.

The new markets are Austria, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Ireland, Poland, South Africa and Spain and all relevant new currencies have also been added (Danish Krone, Polish Zloty and South African Rand). Rates look reasonable – for online trades, the euro markets are €19 (US$25) like others already on the platform, Denmark is DKK160 (US$28), Poland is PLN90 (US$29) and South Africa is ZAR225 (US$27). However, there is of course a foreign currency conversion charge on top, of up to 1%.

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Updates

Saxo Modern Wealth Management cuts fees

Slight delay on updating this due to other commitments, but Saxo announced new fees for its UK Modern Wealth Management service, all of which seem to be in the client’s favour. The main changes are:

  • The waiver of commission on currency conversion for international trades has been made permanent. Any FX mark-up near 0% is rare, so this makes it extremely competitive, with the only downside being that the MWM platform only has a limited range of international markets (the new rates do not apply to Saxo Trader). In particular, it’s good for anyone who wants to hold overseas stocks in an ISA, since Saxo’s new rates make it one of the cheapest ISAs for foreign stocks around.
  • The annual fee of £35 has been removed for regular investment accounts and only applies to ISAs.
  • The fund supermarket has become more competitive – it’s now on an RDR compliant basis and will now return all trail and platform commission to investors. Saxo will charge an annual custody fee of 0.5% on fund holdings, although this is being waived until January 2014. It’s hard to know how competitive 0.5% will look in a year’s time, since most of the supermarkets have not yet announced their post-RDR pricing, but I’d guess it will be mid-tier – other firms such as Cavendish will probably be cheaper. Still, Saxo is for now a much more serious contender as a fund supermarket than it was, so I’ve added it to the fund supermarket table for the time being.

Overally, good to see a firm lowering costs and a contrast to TD Direct Investing’s changes the other day.