Thursday, April 24, 2014

Generating returns from investments not always easy

Frontier markets are relatively risky assets. Five years ago, all the German dentists were investing in Vietnam, and then it collapsed. More recently, they all wanted to buy Myanmar assets.

But investors must understand, yes, long term, they will grow, but there is an execution risk. I'm the chairman of a fund in Cambodia, and I'm not managing the fund, I'm just the chairman of the board, so I look after investors' interests, but the manager so far has really failed to perform particularly well, given the strong growth rate Cambodia has, for the simple reason that they invested money in numerous assets that didn't work out.

So this is not such a simple game. We always have to consider, optically China had macroeconomically the best growth anyone could imagine for the last 15 years. But I wonder who has made money in Chinese stocks. Not many people.

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