Jonathan Garner: Equity Markets Respond to Global Shifts

Global moves in elections, COVID restrictions and energy prices are having ripple effects across markets. How should investors think about these dynamics for Asia and EM equities?

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Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Jonathan Garner, chief Asia and Emerging Markets Equity Strategist for Morgan Stanley Research. Along with my colleagues, bringing you their perspectives, today I'll be talking about our latest view on Asia and EM equities. It's Friday, November the 5th at 2pm in London.

Overall, in our coverage, we continue to prefer Japan to Non-Japan Asia and Emerging Markets. Japan has outperformed Emerging Markets by 500 basis points year to date but remains cheaper to its own recent valuation history than Emerging Markets and with stronger upward earnings revisions. New Liberal Democratic Party leader Kishida-san has recently fought and won a snap election in the lower house of the Japanese parliament. The governing Center-Right coalition, which he now leads, did considerably better than polling had suggested prior to the election outcome. Although there may be some changes in policy emphasis compared with the Abe and Suga premierships, the broad contours of market-friendly macro and micro policy in Japan are likely to continue.

Elsewhere within Emerging Markets, we're most constructive on Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa and in particular Russia, Saudi Arabia and UAE, which are positively leveraged to rising energy prices. We're also warming up to ASEAN, having upgraded Indonesia to overweight alongside our existing overweight on Singapore. ASEAN economies are finally beginning to reopen post-COVID, which is stimulating domestic consumption.

However, we have recommended taking profits on Indian equities after a year of exceptionally strong performance. We remain structurally bullish on a cyclical recovery in earnings growth in India, but with forward price earnings valuations now very high to history and peers, and with rising energy prices a headwind for India, we think it's time to move to the sidelines. Within Latin America, we've also established a clear preference for Chile versus Brazil on relative economic momentum and export price dynamics.

Finally, we remain underweight Taiwan and equal weight China. For Taiwan, our contrarian negative view relates to our expectation of a semiconductor downcycle in 2022 and a slowing retail investor boom. Meanwhile, China equities continue to face numerous headwinds, including Delta variant COVID outbreaks, property developer deleveraging and the medium to long term impact on private sector growth stocks from the recent regulatory reset. Although valuations have improved in pockets, we expect further earnings downgrades for China and await a clearer pickup in growth and liquidity before turning more constructive.

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