Indonesia: BRIC should be BRIIC

We have all heard of BRIC, but I think the world is ignoring one giant country-Indonesia. It is the fourth largest country in the world in population, after China, India, and USA. It is bigger than both Brazil and Russia, and I think people are being carried away by the BRIC story. You will hear good things about Indonesia in the years to come.

In US Markets, there are a couple of closed end funds for investing in Indonesia, but I am more into passive investing and indexing-so stay away from them. I do have some TLK in my portfolio-it is the biggest cellular operator in that country. Hopefully we will have good ETFs for Indonesia in the coming months and years.

Have been reading Adam Smith lately-The Wealth of Nations, unabridged, unedited. What a masterpiece. Found more support of my theory that it is the number of humans which ultimately decides how rich a nation becomes (measurable by the stock market size and also GDP).

Notwithstanding the fall in stocks in the last few weeks, especially FXI, the tracker for China stocks, I remain as bullish as ever on China and India. These are the future superpowers of the world-and with the financial situation in China, 1.6 trillion in reserves, we should already call it a superpower. The Chinese should stop pretending that they are a developing country, a poor country. The world needs to come to terms with this fast.

But let's not forget Indonesia. It has the same population size as the USA approximately-and seeems to have been ignored by the BRIC hype. I think we should change that acronym to BRIIC-the two I's for India and Indonesia. Indonesia will be the fourth largest economy in the next few decades.

Sanjay John G.

Welcome the Chinese Yuan as the new world reserve currency

Belarus added the Chinese Yuan as a reserve currency in addition to the USD, RR and EUR.
I want to congratulate the National Bank of Belarus for having the foresightedness to make this important move!

See news story here.

Chinese stocks, as measured by FXI, are the best performers in any emerging market portfolio. I believe people are still underestimating the impact China will have on the world economy in the future years.

Yes, they will talk about the Chinese bubble. But is it a bubble? If you have seen my previous posts (see the main theory here), where I argue that in a free market economy, the overall stock market cap of a country is proportional to it's total population (much like the GDP), do you know that if China was a developed country today, FXI would be trading at USD 4000? That is twenty times from the 190 dollars it is trading today in New York.

Of course, China is not a developed country yet-so it will be a few decades before the market goes 20x, but the point is-this is the investing opportunity of a lifetime. Add the fact that most of the Chinese big companies are majority owned by the Government, a Government which has $1.4 Trillion in reserves, and is adding reserves at $200-300B per year, and you know why I believe this is the best opportunity if you consider risk/reward-the Chinese Government automatically puts a put option on the market if things overheat, etc and the market collapses. And the fact that prices of shares in FXI are trading at a 30-40% discount to what the Chinese are paying for the same shares in Shanghai, adds another margin of of safety for your portfolio of China stocks.

Back to my theory now, and why I think we are nowhere near a crash in China. I did some research in what happened in Japan in the late eighties-when the market went completely nuts and then crashed in 1990-91 by 75%. You see, the market cap of Japan at one time overtook the market cap of United States, which is a problem because Japan is only half the population of the United States, and unless you believe that an average Japanese is twice as productive as an American, that can't hold on for too long. That is why we can say that the Japanese market entered bubble territory, and crashed, and stayed low.

You can think about my theory as the idea of buying a well diversified company operating in many different businesses (the company being the economy of a whole country), and the argument is that it is simply the number of human being in the company which will determine the total value of this company. A country can be thought of as a ultra mega GE or Tyco. This is the human capital of a country-which is why I call my theory the human capital theory of financial markets, and that is what will determine how much the country's stock market will be worth, in a free market economy.

The message is clear-stay long China. The Yuan is the currency of the future-flight to safety will be called flight to Chinese stocks in the years to come. We kinda saw that in the last few months-but the trend should only strengthen. Together with the Indian Rupee, the Chinese Yuan will be called the safest currency of the world in the future. I even dared to coined a name for the merged Chinese Indian currency-the Ruan. See post here...:-)

Sanjay

The Real Macro Picture, The Ruan, Private Equity and The Hedge Fund Disaster

Let me give you a really big macro picture, following up on my previous post of why you must invest only in China and India, and throw out all other stocks you have in your portfolio, unless you have a very very good reason to hold them. See that post here

China and India are going to be the two biggest economies of the world within the next 50 years. The money flow of the world is very clear-capital is being sucked out of the developed world and going into the developing world-and the two top countries of the developing world are China and India, because of their size.

The Chinese and Indian party has just started. This party has a lot many years to go-and you want to get on the trend now. In a couple of decades the Chinese Yuan and the Indian Rupee will be the "index" currencies, like the Dollar now. I am proposing a new currency-the Ruan, combining the Rupee and Yuan, which will make life easier for all of humanity. The top two economies of the world of the future will eventually unite to create the Ruan.

It is nice to see hedge funds and private equity losing money, finally. Lots of studies have been published on what these guys do, just do a google search-and from what I understand, all they were doing is playing the leverage game. You see, the SPY returning 10% a year can be the index return, but if you leverage your portfolio 3x, your returns are 30% a year. Your drawdowns are higher, but overall, if you can stay solvent, and always find money for less than 10% a year for leverage in some corner of the world, and invest it in the SPY, whether it is US bonds or the Japanese Yen, you will come out ahead of the SPY. Studies show that all the hedge funds and private equity people are doing is getting cheap access to capital and leveraging it to create this illusion of higher return. Pension Funds and Institutional investors will be killed if they go on margin to buy stocks they like or use options and futures-so they also joined the hedge fund/PE party by putting an "allocation" to them in their portfolios. All in the name of the big D, Diversification.

No more of this, please. Stocks like BX, FIG and MF, are doomed for a while-whether they take down the whole financial world with it remains to be seen. Agreed that some people working in these companies do make the acquired companies better, by running them more efficiently, cutting costs, reducing overheads of a public company, etc. but most of the time they are playing the leverage game. And nice to see that the investors of the world have woken up to this.

The take home message here is:

1. Invest in Emerging Markets, or India and China. Capital flows where the returns are, and returns are made by human beings eventually, and these countries are where you want to put your capital to work.
2. Stay away from Hedge Funds, Private Equity, etc. Unless they can really add value to a business, they are a dying breed-like the LBO firms a couple of decades ago. No more of this crap called "Financial Engineering". I am an Engineer myself and I don't know of any University which offers a Degree in Financial Engineering. Just wearing a suit and renting a fancy Manhattan or London Office doesn't make you smarter-even though you do impress everybody. Can't believe that even the humble Chinese fell for the Blackstone IPO-they invested $3B in the company! But I guess they can learn some cool stuff about buyouts, and the knowledge will be used effectively in buyouts and mergers in China, even if BX collapses completely.
3. Welcome the Ruan-the unified Indian Rupee and Chinese Yuan currency, which will be the currency of the future.

Sanjay

Why you should buy stocks in China and India-and sell all your developed market stocks (or short them)

In this post, I will try to prove to you that at this time, it makes sense for you to buy China and India stocks, and sell every developed country stock you got. If you are more adventurous, sell the developed country stocks short and use the cash to buy China and India stocks.

Let me introduce you to two graphs first.

The first graph shows no. of High Net Worth Individuals (HNWI) (People over USD 1 Million dollars in assets, excluding their house) in selected developed countries (note at bottom on why this selection) and the population of these countries. Data is from 2006 and 2005 (extrapolated).

The second graph shows their total stock market cap plotted against the country's population. Data is from 2006 and 2005 (extrapolated).


As you can see clearly-the stock market cap of a country and the number of HNWI in it are proportional to the total number of people in the country, to a very good approximation.

Also note that most HNWI invest in the stock market, so the above graphs are really one and the same thing-just showing clearly the correlation of wealth to population.

I am omitting a graph here-that the GDP of these countries also scales well with their population (the correlation is not as good as in the graphs above. I don't trust GDP calculations very well, because there are different methodologies of calculating GDP followed in these countries)

Now we go back to some basic stuff. What are we doing when we buy stocks? We are essentially buying human creativity, producivity, the ability of human beings to make the world better for themselves, individually and collectively. Economics tells us that selfishly working for themselves, trying to make more money for themselves, humans do a lot of good for each other indirectly-and I believe it was Milton Freidman who argued that that was really the best way to do collective good-to work selfishly for your own interest.

Essentially, when you put money in the market, on a major index like the SP 500, you buy the raw power of 300 Million Americans working for you. The point I want you to take from here is-you are investing in humans first, then the sectors/industries/hot areas/growth stocks, etc. I will call this theory of mine the "human capital" theory of investing.

In a free market economy-humans will find out the best way to allocate capital, and themselves, to produce the most. That is why stock market capitalization of the five developed countries above are proportional to the number of people they have. A fraction of these people becomes millionaires, and the number of these HNWI is also proportional to the total population of the country. It intuitively makes sense.

Go back 20-30 years ago. China and India were not open markets, socialism and government control was making massive mistakes in allocation of capital. Same goes for other emerging markets like Russia and Brazil. We had a problem-free markets were not allowed to operate in the "developing" countries-mostly by rogue or unknowledgeable governments.

When free markets were embraced in China and India, the world there suddenly changed. The State was not fixing prices-it was letting the market economy decide where to best allocate capital and human resources.

Since India has 1.1B people, and China 1.3B people, given that free markets are going great in these countries now, and private industry is increasing it's share of economy-it is very likely that these two countries will become "developed" countries in the years to come. The Goldman 2003 report and it's subsequent updates give some timelines to that-that China will be the biggest economy of the world by 2030-2040, India will be second, etc.

Since GDP/Overall Stock Market Cap/No. of HNWI are proportional to the population of a country, in a free market economy, it is obvious that the richest people and the biggest stock markets in the next few decades will be China and India( I actually think that the Goldman report is underestimating how fast these countries will come up-I believe by 2020 China will be the world's biggest economy, and by 2025, India will be the second biggest economy of the world..with the related increase in total stock market caps and No. of HNWI. Note that this can happen if the countries mentioned above go into a recession-one side can start losing and the other side (India and China) can gain).

So fast forward to 2025 AD.

The top two economies of the world will be China and India. These will have the biggest stock market caps of the world country stock market caps, and will also have the highest number of HNWI.

USA today has a market cap of 16 Trillion Dollars with 300Million population.

China is a market cap of 2 Trillion Dollars (approx-including some of Hong Kong) with 1.3B people.

India is a market cap of 1 Trillion dollars with 1.1 Billion people.

A possible scenario in 2025 (or whenever China and India will become "developed" nations):

China Market cap 120T
India Market cap 100T
USA market cap 30T

The growth in the stock market caps (and therefore a well diversified portfolio in each of these countries) will be fastest for China and India. Your investment money today will go much farther in these countries than the developed countries mentioned above.


Why did I choose these five developed countries and not others? Because they are the biggest developed countries, and also because stocks of these countries are primarily owned by local investors.

This argument can be extended to prove why the developing world returns (emerging market returns) will grow faster than the developed world.

As capitalists, or owners of capital, people like you and me can move our money around much faster than GM or F actually shutting down their facilities and only importing Chinese and Indian cars. Capital goes where returns are-you know that you want to invest in China and India-because that's where the "human capital" is.

A couple of other things:

Other developing countries are great to invest to-but they will saturate out because of limited human capital.

Countries which hold resources of value to China and India-Brazil, Russia, Australia and Canada, raw materials which can't be easily duplicated by the Chinese and the Indians, will prosper the best by selling the raw materials to China and India. The information edge, the soft power, of USA, UK, France, Germany and Japan is largely going to be gone because of development of markets in China and India. Some companies like Microsoft are likely to prosper-but anything which is "physically manufacturable(Airplanes, pharmaceuticals)" and "not-an-addiction (Windows)" will move over to China and India.


Sanjay