Borderless Investor

ETF junkies have been dying for a frontier markets fund for quite some time, and their wish has finally come true. Claymore/BNY Mellon Frontier Markets just started trading under the ticker FRN. Given the buzz surrounding frontier markets, FRN will probably sell like hotcakes, but don’t celebrate just yet.
As with any ETF, take a […]

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Nothing makes the arbitrary separation of foreign/domestic or developed/emerging markets look more ridiculous than the mining sector. Amazingly, people still think this way. Bloomberg points out that emerging market mining shares sell for a 23% discount to US-based peers, despite much, much better fundamentals.
Olivier Eugene, a fund manager at AXA sums it up nicely:
“It […]

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It’s one thing to move a couple key executives to London or even change your “official” headquarters to Dubai (as Halliburton has done). But it’s quite another to shift an entire business unit across the Atlantic.
That’s what GE is doing with its consumer finance business “GE Money”.
Not surprisingly, it has ruffled a few […]

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The plunge in global markets in the first two weeks of the new year has been painful, but it will ultimately create a bevy of buying opportunities. But sifting through the wreckage yourself can be a daunting task. The good news is that some of the best global value investors around are opening their doors […]

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There’s no shortage of places to find valuation ratios (P/E, price-to-book, price-to-sales, etc.) on the web. But good luck finding a reputable data provider that compares them across countries, in a consistent manner, and for FREE. The S&P/Citigroup family of global indices is an exception, and a very handy resource.

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Global diversification can work wonders for a company’s performance. But it can’t work miracles. General Motors is Exhibit A. Bloomberg reports that GM expects to garner 75% of its revenue from outside the U.S. by 2010 versus 58% today. Compared with its U.S. operations, its business is booming overseas.
“GM has very aggressive growth plans […]

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Look for a few changes here at Borderless Investor in the year ahead. The previous post should give some sense of what’s to come. I am hoping to make the site a bit less bloggish and more of a collection of helpful links to articles, data sources, and other sites of interest to fellow Borderless […]

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The IMF’s Data Mapper function is a really cool way to play around with global economic stats. This data map shows GDP growth rates by country. It seems pretty clear from this that even if the US and European economies slow down a bit, there are plenty of other regions out there that can pick […]

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WSJ has a copy of a memo from M&A uber-lawyer Marty Lipton to clients on the outlook for 2008 M&A activity.
Lipton cites 6 reasons why M&A will continue despite the credit crunch:
• The desire of some countries to create “national champions” in basic industries, and of a
few countries, like Russia, to create “global champions.”
• […]

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Today’s “Ahead of the Tape” column in WSJ (sub req’d) noted the role of emerging markets as an engine for global economic growth. This time it’s emerging markets pulling the US along, rather than the other way around, as it has been in the past.
The column cites IMF forecasts call for about 2.5% economic […]

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