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Specialist in Asia Pacific, China, India and South East Asia and Global Emerging Market equities.
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formerly Realindex Investments
Leader in active quantitative equities across Australian equities, global equities, emerging markets and global small companies.
Backed by a unique blend of research, portfolio construction and risk management, focused on uncovering original insights and translating them into investment strategies that are active and systematic, aiming to generate alpha.
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At Stewart Investors, we believe in putting people first. Our investment world-view is of a series of partnerships – with each other, with our clients, with the companies we invest in, the people who buy their goods and services, and with the wider society in which we all live and work.
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Showing 1 to 35 of 35 results.
More data has been created in past 2 years than in the entire previous history of the human race. Technologies like apps, are underpinned and supported by data centres, which present a compelling investment opportunity for equities investors.
Pilbara iron ore leads the global market for this in-demand resource. Watch this video with Head of Australian Equities Growth, Dushko Bajic, for an outlook for the iron ore trade.
They say a rising tide lifts all boats. This certainly appeared to be the case for emerging market debt in 2019. Central banks around the world offered a little help, providing the liquidity and easy monetary conditions required to boost sentiment and support valuations. Jamie Grant, Head of Emerging Market and Asia Fixed Income, considers whether there’s room for further upside in the asset class in 2020.
Office real estate is undergoing a fundamental shift, while COVID-19 has accelerated a number of global real estate investment trends, including the continued growth and adoption of e-commerce and falling home ownership.
There’s a reasonable chance of achieving your investment objective over the long term by sticking to the plan. Not so fast! Here's why it's time to review your approach to asset allocation with volatile times ahead.
Benchmark Relative. Absolute Return. Total Return? Global unconstrained? Here our global fixed income team demystify some of the common language used to describe approaches to fixed income investing – explaining the differences – and how they can be applied to various objective-based strategies within a broader portfolio.
Value investors have seen their portfolios soar, while growth stocks have languished. In this paper we look at some of the drivers behind recent market moves, including the effect of rising interest rates, earnings disappointments and the subsequent de-rating of growth stocks.
In an environment of uncertainty, infrastructure investments can provide investors with a sense of reassurance. Regardless of short-term market ‘noise’, every nation depends on roads, utilities, airports, railways, pipelines and wireless towers, in order to function effectively. These sectors share common characteristics, like barriers to entry and pricing power, which provides investors with the potential for inflation-protected income and strong capital growth over the medium-term. Even as the world grapples with the complexities of the pandemic re-opening, we believe the outlook for the asset class is positive. The First Sentier Global Listed Infrastructure Fund invests in a diverse range of assets across a number of regions. However, we see particularly strong opportunities for several infrastructure asset types.
If “they” are right, then there is virtually never a bad time to be fully invested. The term "volatility” has become a euphemism. What people mean when they say, “markets have experienced some volatility” is that markets have gone down. You never hear a financial commentator bang on about those pesky volatile stocks that are up every single day and breaking new highs.
In 2020, one group of companies has done particularly well – the popular digital technology companies focused on e-commerce, delivery and entertainment, to name a few industries. In emerging markets, they dominate the Chinese market; but they can also be found in Korea, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America. We do not own many of these in the strategy; and as such, we are often asked: What holds us back? After all, they have performed well and – at least on paper – should have the prerequisite to generate strong returns and free cash flow, given their often high gross margins, negative working capital profiles and asset light nature. While we are not disputing the potential for this in the future, we would argue for cautiousness on most of these projections.
While the wild swings in share, credit, currency, and commodity markets have garnered most of the attention in the months following the COVID-19 outbreak, cash markets in Australia have seen some highly unusual movements that demand further scrutiny.
Mr Aditya Puri, who had only recently retired as the CEO of HDFC Bank, had joined the board of a small, unlisted pharmaceutical company, Stelis Biopharma. Given Mr Puri’s remarkable leadership at HDFC Bank, we dug deeper into his new role. In addition to his board role at Stelis, he had accepted the position of an advisor to the broader Strides Group.
COVID-19 has sent shockwaves through capital markets, and property securities have been no exception. The crisis has plunged the global economy into recession and has given rise to the remote work and learning thematic, while seemingly fasttracking the rise of e-commerce. These well documented trends have rightly called into question the long-term outlook of office buildings and shopping malls, among other types of real estate, which has seen some investment industry pundits subsequently question whether property securities is still a prudent place to gain liquid exposure to real assets. The answer is a profound ‘yes’. In this piece, we explore how the global property securities universe is much more than just office buildings and shopping malls, offering active investors a plethora of compelling investment opportunities in the current environment.
According to Fed chairman, Jerome Powell, “Inflation is low and stable”, but given that “growth is running at a healthy clip…and wages are up” the Fed is clearly anticipating rising inflation and is tightening monetary policy accordingly. So, how should equity investors respond to higher inflation?
Global listed infrastructure underperformed in 2023 owing to rising interest rates and a shift away from defensive assets. Relative valuations are now at compelling levels. Infrastructure assets are expected to see earnings growth in 2024 and beyond, aided by structural growth drivers.
The pandemic has accelerated certain long-term shifts in consumer behaviour, such as using more online orders for everything from clothing to food. The latest battleground appears to be groceries, but the disrupter emerged from a not-so-new technology — WeChat groups. China’s online e-commerce giants such as Meituan and Pinduoduo are now taking market share from the traditional grocers via community group buying (CGB), which began only four years ago and went mainstream during Covid-19. In this form of e-commerce, leaders of WeChat — or other platforms which recently entered the market — collect orders and have the goods delivered the next day to pick-up spots in their members’ communities. In between, the orders are aggregated by the platforms and transmitted to the upstream suppliers which deliver the goods.
On the anniversary of Lehman's collapse and as Typhoon #10 approached Hong Kong, Martin Lau spent time reflecting on the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis and here discusses if lessons learned are enough to steer us clear of another global financial crisis.
Since our last update, global markets have not been short of action and the manic behaviour characterising today’s markets has taken investors on another rollercoaster ride. While not quite comparable to the market movements seen during the dark days of March 2020, the recent correction — especially in China-related companies — has been notable. Yet, from a market perspective, a sense of normality is finally starting to emerge after the more speculative phases over the past 12-18 months. Companies related to the Work- or Consumed-From-Home environment are starting to discount a more realistic outlook and, equally, franchises with good long-term prospects that were experiencing temporary uncertainties caused by the pandemic have, for the most part, regained some of the lost ground as their underlying business fundamentals continue to improve.
The outlook for the global economy and financial markets looks more uncertain today than it has for a long time. Both interest rates and inflation have risen sharply. There is a growing consensus that much of the world will shortly be experiencing slowing economic growth.
In our last client update, written through the depths of Covid-despair, we observed that real life and the world of markets are seldom so intimately entwined. With markets swinging violently to the downside on a riptide of fear, it was clear even then that activity was being driven by short-term anxiety rather than a real evaluation of Asia’s longer-term value-accretion prospects.
Head of Global Property Securities Stephen Hayes: Global city populations continue to grow, driven by urbanisation. The provision of housing for growing populations is a major challenge for many countries and cities. Adequate housing is a factor that influences a city’s mobility of labour, social wellbeing and commerce levels. Government housing policies are typically viewed holistically with policies covering social, private and rental housing. New supply is not always efficient and can be problematic particularly in densely populated cities.
The Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has seen most financial assets sell-off across the board, including securities in the traditionally defensive listed property sector, as investors grapple with how the drastic government and central bank responses to the crisis will augur for property landlords in the shorter term.
With strong long term growth prospects and a track record of resilience through economic downturns, this increasingly institutionalised property sector is a defensive play for investors.
The world is on the cusp of a revolution in low-carbon technologies, and they are set to reshape many of our supply chains. The not-so-humble battery sits at the heart of this shift: the growth of electric vehicles (EVs), and renewable power generation/storage, will increase demand for a range of raw materials.
The advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is affecting ever expanding fields of human activity. And the way we invest is no exception. It’s never been more timely for investors, advisors and investment managers to take deep stock of the impacts, real and potential, of AI, so we can better prepare to manage them – whether by leveraging opportunities, managing new risks or, more likely, both.
We are entering a new era. The year 2024 will be unpredictable and clouded by many uncertainties. It will be marked by geopolitical risks, the ongoing taming of the inflation beast, and how the US Presidential election will impact markets.
We recently spent a couple of weeks in the US and Canada, meeting with management teams from the railroads, utilities and energy midstream sectors, as well as with regulators. Below are some of our findings. We hope you find them interesting.
Though Covid hasn’t yet finished with us, the markets have finished with Covid. In real life, there is still plenty of misery to go around, but in our opinion things have seldom been better for investors. Optimism has served us well, as the money-printing presses have rolled to counter the “unprecedented” threat. In investment, perhaps it is better to be a stupid optimist than a clever pessimist. And, we believe markets do indeed go up most of the time.
Despite straddling two of the most disrupted years in living memory, the FY20-21 reporting season was overall very positive. In our analysis, around one-third of companies [that we cover] surprised us on the upside, around one-third delivered in line with expectation, and one-third were below expectation. Our investment approach focuses on selecting companies with strong return on equity and return on invested capital, and these companies delivered superior returns overall. We actually saw EPS grow by 26% over the previous corresponding period, and expect a further 20% growth in the financial year ahead. Put simply, investors in quality stocks were rewarded by strong performance through the reporting season. We were also pleased to see that overall, Australian companies have strong cashflow and balance sheets.
Last quarter I visited infrastructure companies in Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya. The trip included visits to ten corporate head offices and three site tours. This paper seeks to share some of the key findings from my meetings with Japanese passenger rail and utility companies.
In almost every meeting that we have with management teams, we will ask about incentivisation. In our view, it is an important question and the answer can be highly revealing about an organisation’s culture and behaviour. While it can be easy to be deceived by articulate CEOs talking up a big game with lots of investor-friendly buzzwords, in our experience what ultimately drives outcomes (at least the ones that management teams can influence) are the incentives. As with most things, striking the right balance is key. If there are no incentives to good performance (and no disincentive for poor performance), companies often end up with capital being systematically mis-allocated without any accountability. This tends to be the case with most State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs), which is one of the reasons we are generally cautious on them. On the other hand, too much of a good thing can also have adverse consequences, which we often see in turbo-charged incentive schemes concentrated among just a few senior executives. While they might lead to exponential growth for a short period of time, the growth is usually not sustainable. After a rapid period of expansion, imbalances are typically built up and when growth inevitably slows it is usually not just one skeleton that falls out of the closet.
Global listed infrastructure companies outperformed both global equities and bonds in 2022. We believe the financial and economic factors contributing to this outperformance may remain in play in 2023.
We recently spent several weeks in the US visiting listed infrastructure management teams, regulators, politicians, industry associations and conducting asset tours. The following paper provides an overview of our findings.
After decades of flat electricity demand for US utilities, the industry is now seeing unprecedented demand as growth in data centers / AI, electrification, onshoring and electric vehicles outweighs energy efficiency gains. One utility executive stated: “Seeing all these customers wanting 24/7 load and willing to pay for it – it is every utility’s dream”.
In September 2023, I met more than 30 global listed infrastructure companies and stakeholders from the UK, Europe and China. The following travel diary summarises my impressions and findings from these meetings.
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