There’s a Massive Performance Split Happening in EM

Emerging markets are generating surprising performance of late and one fund in particular appears to be benefitting. ETF.com's Dave Nadig, President and Director of Research, and Sumit Roy, Senior ETF Analyst, are joined by Eric Balchunas, Senior ETF Analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence and Elisabeth Kashner,  CFA, Director of Global Research Funds at FactSet to break down the performance splits happening in EM ETFs. To watch the full discussion that includes analysis of silver's flash crash and the fee war impact on active managers, go here. 

Shocking EM Performance

Nadig: Eric, I did want to briefly touch on your comment that you made about the incredible flows that we have seen into emerging markets. The thing that I was surprised by when I started grabbing some charts before this is the spread in performance in emerging markets is just enormous. I mean, we have to call out FRDM, Perth Tolle's Life and Liberty Indexes Freedom 100, which is by far crushing everybody.

Balchunas: Wow.

Nadig: It’s, you know, up 40% more than the average EM fund over the last 12 months, which is insane. Almost entirely on the back of Taiwan and South Korea, because those are its giant bets, but the spread here is crazy.

Balchunas: Yeah. Holy moly. I didn’t know that. I didn’t know it was that extreme. 

Kashner: But that’s not that unusual, right? We see this in segment after segment across the industry, that your normative case is that your broad market vanilla funds, in this case represented by EEM, kind of hug the middle of the chart, and everything else bounces up and down around it. 

To me, I think the really interesting thing with EM flows is that we’ve seen a lot more strength going into IEMG compared to EEM, right? And that would sort of harken back to more like, what is the expected time period of this holding? Because IEMG has a little bit less liquidity but also costs a lot less, and so if your time horizon is longer, you’re going to be in that. But I mean, and—hats off to Perth, right? FRDM, she’s done an awesome job there.

Nadig: Yeah, and I think it’s also interesting to see, when I see the EEM, IEMG split on flows, it actually makes me happy. It means people are listening, like we’ve been saying this for years and years and years that you should pay attention to things like your expense ratio and not just buy the ticker you know. So it’s nice to see people actually doing that for once.

Host 2: You know what split’s also interesting? The VWO, IEMG split. You kind of touched on it, Dave, but over the last one year, 1000 basis point difference in performance. And that’s pretty much South Korea, and that’s pretty much just SK Hynix and Samsung—literally two companies driving that, and, you know, that’s the performance split. 

We also see it on the flows. The IEMG is $9 billion year-to-date inflows, VWO is $2 billion. So that seems to me to be people just following the performance, and that performance coming literally from two South Korean stocks, so that’s kind of interesting to see.

Nadig: Yeah, crazy.

Balchunas: And did you see, in January FRDM took $320 million in? That’s a lot for that fund. I was looking, that’s more than it had in assets for its first four years. It took in in January. So it’s good that it’s getting money, ‘cause remember EMXC kind of hogged a lot of the ex-China trade, but Perth is doubling that fund now in the past five years, too. Wow.

Nadig: Yeah, and the performance numbers like this—I mean, when you can start putting up a chart where you’re beating the S&P and everybody else is lagging by 30%, I think you’re going to start—she’s going to continue to get the flows.

Balchunas: Yeah.

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