Fundsmith Emerging Equities Trust

Ada1

I think some EM exposure is reasonable and I also like Smith - have money in Fundsmith and it has done well.

I haven't invested in the Emerging Mkts fund though as I'm not convinced the model will work as well in a new investing universe. My EM exposure is through trackers.

Surreyboy

Thanks for the replies.

As regards the reliability/performance of fund managers, I certainly think that trackers have a place in any portfolio. But, I think that with emerging markets some have a much better future (and less debt, better demographics, less reliance on commodities etc) than others. A tracker would however just choose EM countries in order of the size of their economies.

I certainly take the point that only an exceptional fund manager is worth paying extra for and Terry Smith is untested in this field. I had already considered the Anthony Bolton analogy!

Thanks

Ada1

Trackers track what they're designed to track.... so if you want exposure to some countries and not others you can get trackers on just those.

I guess it depends what you want from the investment. I've got some money in the Blackrock trust you refer to on the basis that I didn't like the index alternatives open to me for that sort of investment; for less frontier markets trackers work fine for me.

george4064

Im personally not interested in FEET.

Two EM ITs Ive been considering are;

Pacific Assets Trust plc (PAC)
JP Morgan Global Emerging Income Trust plc (JEMI)

bowlhead99

Dird wrote: »

I'd rather wait for a year when shares in Chinese/Brazil/oil companies are showing 0-2% growth then hope for a snowball effect

Timing the market is notoriously difficult. Once something bounces back as the best place to be, you've generally already missed it. That's the same whether you're trying to wait for a 3% growth rate to increase to 4% before hopping on board, or a -1% to increase to 0%.

Dird wrote: »

At least Aberdeen has been positive for the last 3 months~ 1 week all the way up to 1 year Fundsmith is always in decline

Ooh, Aberdeen have been showing more than 0% growth? Better pile in then, and hope for a 'snowball effect'!

Or perhaps the other wise posters are right, that looking at prices over 3 months or 1 year is too statistically useless to tell you anything about what will happen for the next decade.


Personally, I am still putting some new money into EM (including frontier) though no more aggressively than a year or three ago, even if the prices look ostensibly cheaper than they once were.

I think regular EM equity is probably a better bet than EM equity income or EM debt. The latter two are likely more susceptible to falls as US rates rise. As noted by others above, much of what is predicted is already in the current prices, but there is still prospective downside when a negative event that has been predicted, actually turns out to be true.

I tend to prefer active management rather than passive indexes for new and emerging markets (though of course there are arguments for and against which I don't intend to rehash here!). In a sense, Fundsmith would sit well with that remit because it is intended to be a relatively small concentration of high conviction picks. However, he does not have a track record in the space and a track record of delivery is important when selecting among active managers. I didn't find the trust amazingly compelling last time I looked.

I am still in TEMIT which invests more widely (and unlike Smith, is not specifically aim to always avoid financial sector and cyclicals - it is happy to go up when markets are up and down when they are down). However, its previous star manager (Mobius) is now sitting back in a 'still involved with the team in some way but not really very hands-on any more' kind of role and the last few years of shaky markets have not really given much of an impression of how good their succession planning is likely to have been.