12 Years of VP vs Noise
Sharing the ideas and experiences that have influenced our work
Switzerland Facing Effects of Consumer Debt Binge
While the Swiss banking sector has deleveraged over the past decade, the household sector exploited record low interest rates and strong income growth to take on more debt and fund acquisitions in the booming property market. Relative to GDP, household debt is now the...
PBoC to take CNHKRW Higher
This post is taken from our August 7th weekly report. USDCNH breached the 6.90 mark last week, having been under 6.30 just four months ago. This 10% depreciation has come against a backdrop of slowing Chinese growth and escalating US trade tensions. Although there...
China Losing its Edge on Exports
The meteoric rise in Chinese exports now appears to be losing steam with world export market share falling by 1%-point over the last two years and potentially mirroring Japan’s long-term retrenchment. While the sluggish pace of world trade growth since 2008 has...
If China loses, who wins?
With China taking the brunt of the escalating trade war, we have identified several economies that could benefit from China’s loss (assuming that President Trump continues to focus on China and does not pursue blanket tariffs on all exporting nations). To gauge this,...
RUBCAD to Catch up to Crude Oil
RUBCAD tends to be a FX pair that’s highly correlated with moves in Brent (top-left chart). The main appeal of RUBCAD as a relative-value trade against crude is that there is much less direct US dollar exposure from the trade. Both Russia and Canada are dependent on...
Understanding EM Crises
We recently published a new white paper on EM Crises. In this report, we look at the history of EM crises. How they unfold, and when they become buying opportunities. EM crises have generated some of the largest market sell-offs in the last 25 years. At the...
Chilean Peso-Copper Correlation Returns
Having suffered at the hands of the protracted drawdown in global copper prices over the course of 2011-2015, Chilean copper production has recovered in line with the rally in prices since the beginning of 2017. This in turn has allowed the Chilean peso-copper...
The Asian Currency Crisis of 1997: What You Can Learn From It
Failing to spot the Asian currency crisis of 1997 would have been disastrous for an investor. In the case of Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines, it took almost a decade for equity markets to reach January 1997 levels again in nominal terms. But, how can you see a...
Watch the Yield Curve for Value Outperforming Momentum
(from our weekly report of May 29th) Momentum continues to carry the market. Of the main pure factors listed by Bloomberg for the US, it is the best performing on a YTD and a one-year basis (top-left chart). At the other end of the scale, the value factor has...