Hedge funds posted gains in April as regional equity and currency markets across China, Russia, Brazil and the Middle East posted sharp gains. Volume surged on the Shanghai/Hong Kong Connect program to a daily record driving Chinese A-shares to a gain of over 18 per cent for the month. The HFRI Fund Weighted Composite Index®… Continue Reading
Tag Archives: BRIC
Markit: emerging markets still “downbeat” about future
By Andrei Skvarsky. Global financial information provider Markit says a survey it made last month suggests emerging markets remain “downbeat” about the future. {{{?}}} “Improving confidence and post-crisis high capex and hiring intentions in the developed world contrast markedly with ongoing downbeat expectations for the year ahead across the emerging markets,” the London-headquartered company said… Continue Reading
EAST CAPITAL COMMENT: Confessions of an emerging market optimist
By Marcus Svedberg, Chief Economist, East Capital.* Arguably it is not very easy to be an emerging market (EM) optimist these days. It seems like almost everything and everyone is against the group of markets that were once the darlings of investors. Tapering is the most obvious cause for pessimism and is the most important… Continue Reading
Royal Bank of Scotland subsidiary says BRIC obsolete term
By Andrei Skvarsky. Coutts, a lender owned by Royal Bank of Scotland, argues that the 13-year-old BRIC term is obsolete. {{{?}}} The economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China are much too different in size and performance to justify seeing the four nations as a distinctive group. Moreover, there is a bunch of other emerging… Continue Reading
An intelligent , English CV Template
{{{?}}} For professionals working in a new culture, it’s crucial that employers can easily grasp the value of your past experience to them and their company. Unfortunately, there is a lot of terrible advice on the internet and some terrible ‘standard’ formats. The Europass CV template is the most common and probably the worst and… Continue Reading
GOLDMAN SACHS COMMENT: A Few Days in Africa
By Jim O’Neill, Chairman, Goldman Sachs Asset Management. I spent three days in Africa this week, or to be precise, Cape Town and briefly {{{*}}} Johannesburg in South Africa, as well as Lagos and Abuja in Nigeria. I attach the charts from my presentation about Africa’s potential, its challenges, and its current and future position… Continue Reading
GOLDMAN SACHS COMMENT: Is There Method in the Madness?
By Jim O’Neill, Chairman, Goldman Sachs Asset Management (this week’s ‘Viewpoints’). My last week was especially exhausting as there was so much going on and I had to organise so many things. And I wasn’t even travelling! Just trying to keep up with the huge array of things going on everywhere was tough enough, never… Continue Reading
GOLDMAN SACHS COMMENT: Will the BRICS Announce a BRICS Development Bank?
By Jim O’Neill, Goldman Sachs Asset Management (weekly “Vewpoints”) Most stock markets enjoyed a further rally last week with a lot of subsequent media attention especially surrounding the succession of record highs in the Dow Jones index in the US, although the S&P is still yet to vault its pre-crisis highs. It wasn’t such a… Continue Reading
Markit says world business, mainly US and Chinese firms, upbeat about 2013
By Andrei Skvarsky. According to Markit, a global financial information services company, {{{*}}} the global business community is today much more upbeat about the year ahead than it was last October, with the United States and China showing the highest optimism. “Worldwide business confidence has revived from the post-crisis low seen late last year, with… Continue Reading
GOLDMAN SACHS COMMENT: From the weekly Viewpoints of Jim O'Neill, Chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management
European Glory. So yet another year of European dreams comes {{{*}}} to an end for United, and this time in such harsh circumstances. Last Tuesday in Manchester had it all. As I wrote at the time of the draw for the last 16 in the Champions League, for me, it brought back memories as a… Continue Reading
FTI Consulting: global business “surprisingly” upbeat about world banking
By Andrei Skvarsky. FTI Consulting, a global business advisory firm, has said it has carried out a poll that suggests the world business community is “surprisingly” optimistic about the global banking industry. {{{*}}} Of more than 1,000 business leaders in major global economies who were questioned in the survey, 89% believed their home country’s banking… Continue Reading
Sberbank says Russia’s economic growth driven by consumer sectors
{{{?}}} By Andrei Skvarsky. Sberbank has released an extensive body of research arguing that Russia’s economic growth is driven by consumer-related sectors and not by oil and gas, and that those sectors offer vast opportunities to investors. While extractive industries account for two-thirds of Russia’s stock market, and oil and gas dominate the country’s exports,… Continue Reading
GOLDMAN SACHS COMMENT: Some Questions for the Asian Economic Century
By Jim O’Neill, Chairman, Goldman Sachs Asset Management. I returned from a quick trip through parts of Asia on Saturday, thinking that we have reached a critical stage in terms of economic policy and development in many parts of that region, especially in terms of whether this century will turn out to be “theirs” in… Continue Reading
GOLDMAN SACHS COMMENT: Markets and Moods
By Jim O’Neill, Chairman, Goldman Sachs Asset Management. Markets and Moods. So, here’s the situation. The mood is grim. A lot of economic data has turned grimmer, which makes many people so bearish about many things, markets included. Much of the “mood” centres on a sense of hopelessness about Europe, with the risk on/risk off… Continue Reading
GOLDMAN SACHS COMMENT: Apple, China and the Growth Markets
By Jim O’Neill, Chairman, Goldman Sachs Asset Management. This past week, I spent 3 days in the US, in New York and Chicago. The main purpose of my NY visit was to host our 2nd GSAM Growth Markets Summit, which was quite an event, with many interesting speakers, panels and a great list of clients.… Continue Reading
GOLDMAN COMMENT: A New Year Ray of Hope?
By Jim O’Neill, Chairman, Goldman Sachs Asset Management Sticking with my theme of trying to be pragmatic, the first week of 2012 closed with, on the one hand, a few highly interesting developments, and on the other hand, a sense of 2011 déjà vu, especially as it relates to Europe. Following the tone of my… Continue Reading
Some BRICs Built But More Still Needed
Jim O’Neill, Chairman, Goldman Sachs Asset Management Tomorrow, Wednesday, November 30 is the tenth anniversary of when I first mentioned the BRIC acronym when I published GS Global Economics Paper No: 66, “Building Better Global Economic BRICs.” As I am sure a number of readers now know, I am publishing a book to celebrate the… Continue Reading
WEAFER COMMENT: Big Boost for EM and for Russia
By Chris Weafer, Chief Strategist at Troika Dialog. The weekly equity funds flow report from EPFR Global showed a big jump in new investment into emerging market funds for the week ended Wednesday. A total of $3.5 bln was invested into all EM funds compared to $1.0 bln the week before. Russia dedicated funds reported… Continue Reading
BRIC exchanges join up the dots for alliance
By Marcus Williams. The exchanges of the emerging markets bloc of Brazil, Russia, India and China are forming an alliance to help deepen their liquidity and offer investors pooled exposure to their markets. This initiative was announced at the 51st AGM of the World Federation of Exchanges (WFE) in Johannesburg yesterday. The initiative brings together… Continue Reading
HSBC launches emerging markets ETF on the LSE
By Andrei Skvarsky. HSBC, Europe’s largest bank, has launched an emerging markets fund onto the London Stock Exchange. The Irish-domiciled HSBC MSCI Emerging Markets Exchange Trade Fund will replicate the performance of the Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI) emerging markets index, which tracks the performance of major companies in countries such as Brazil, Russia, China… Continue Reading
GOLDMAN COMMENT: Looking through the fog
By Jim O’Neil, Chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management. In the past week, we have experienced remarkable turmoil in financial markets, which have brought back memories for many people of the darkest days of late 2008. Are direct parallels to 2008 valid ? Many other questions also come to mind. Are current market valuation levels… Continue Reading
RBC offers emerging markets fund “beyond the BRIC”
By Ivan Anderzhanov RBC Asset Management is making its emerging markets fund available to Canadian investors seeking returns “beyond” the emerging BRIC rainbow of economies. Doug Coulter, president of RBC Asset Management, claimed the fund provides investors with a “low-fee emerging market investment” of companies broadly diversified “beyond the typical offerings of Brazil, Russia, India… Continue Reading