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Webinar description:
Emerging market assets have played a key role in scheme portfolios for many years – offering both diversification benefits as well as the potential for higher returns due to greater economic growth in these economies.
Yet, despite the potential advantages of allocations, UK schemes remain significantly underweight in emerging markets – a lower weighting that is often driven by fears of economic and political volatility in some emerging markets as well as concerns in areas such as governance, ESG and climate change.
This webinar will look some of the key issues around emerging markets from the standpoint of two different asset classes – emerging market equities and emerging market debt – and assess how they have evolved in the current geopolitical and post-pandemic environment. Our expert speakers will look at the EMD market, how it has grown and how schemes are currently allocating to EMD though stand-alone allocations or as part of blended or multi-asset approaches. It will also look at some of the challenges of EMD investing and how they can be overcome.
We will also assess themes in emerging market equities focussing on areas such as ex-China portfolios, emerging market selectivity as part of the mixed re-opening trade, and China as a stand-alone allocation.
Presenters
Alex Thompson is a vice president of Loomis Sayles Investments Limited, Loomis Sayles’ London-based entity, and an investment director for the alpha strategies group, supporting the multi-asset credit and emerging markets debt blended total return strategies. He is responsible for supporting the growth and retention for these strategies through strategic product planning and development, market education and product messaging.
Alex joined Loomis Sayles in 2016 as a product specialist for the institutional services team and was promoted to investment director in 2019, initially working for both the Loomis Sayles alpha strategies group and the custom income strategies groups before moving to focus full time on alpha strategies in 2021. He has 19 years of investment industry experience. Previously, Alex led the European fixed income manager research team at Mercer, the global investment consultant.
Prior to joining Mercer in 2007, he was a manager researcher at Aon in London, covering various investment strategies. Alex earned a BSc in applied economics from the University of Plymouth Business School and has passed the Investment Management Certification (IMC) qualification
Jordan is responsible for working with UK Pension Funds and Investment Consultants to improve indexing outcomes with a focus on ETFs. Jordan joined BlackRock in March 2018 from Mercer where he worked as an investment consultant in the Fixed Income manager research boutique. He was lead researcher for UK Fixed Income and Index products, alongside contributing to Mercer's intellectual capital and dynamic asset allocation views. Jordan earned a BSc (Hons) in Economics from the University of Leeds, is a CFA charter holder and holds the Investment Management Certificate.
Jean-Maurice Ladure is Executive Director and Head of Applied Research, EMEA with responsibility for research to support new and existing indexes and risk models, including factor, ESG, climate change, thematic and economic exposure indexes, as well as performance and risk attribution. He also serves as an ambassador to asset owners, asset managers and wealth managers on the role of indexes and factor models in asset allocation and portfolio construction.
Prior to joining MSCI, he held a number of roles at Coutts, the private bank of RBS. As Global Head of Quantitative Solutions, he was instrumental in developing Coutts’ client proposition and was responsible for investment performance analysis and portfolio risk. Before that, he was Head of Investment Strategy in Europe, primarily responsible for making investment recommendations within managed portfolios. This was based on modelling the interactions between economics and financial assets, assessing equity market valuations and capturing investor sentiment effects on markets.
Prior to Coutts, he was an investment strategist at Barclays Wealth and also worked at BNP Paribas Asset Management, as an institutional portfolio manager and quantitative analyst. Jean-Maurice holds a Master’s degree in Economics and Statistics from ENSAE in France and is a CFA charter holder and a French actuary.
Jonathan is editor of Professional Pensions and has been reporting on UK occupational pensions since 2001. He has won a number of awards during his career, most recently the SPP Trade Journalist of the Year Award in 2019. He is also holder of the PMI's Retirement Provision Certificate.
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