Is The Sell-Off Creating A Buying Opportunity In Emerging Markets?

Market corrections are like forks in the road. One road may lead to the next bear market. The other may lead to all-time highs. It’s hard to know in the moment what the future path holds or which road to take, especially as bull markets age. This is one of the reasons investors who try to time or trade the market miss out on its long-term returns.

For example, when U.S. stocks last experienced a 10% decline some two years ago, it took six months before stocks successfully retested their correction lows. But investors who were not spooked by the 10% declines in August 2015 and February 2016 were rewarded with another 60% gain in the S&P 500 through January 2018. In long-lasting bull markets, sometimes the risk is not selling too late, but selling too early.

If you are later in life and cannot endure the potential for another 20% to 40% drop in the equity portion of your portfolio, you must respect the violent fluctuations in stock prices in early February 2018. If this is the beginning of the next bear market, you may be well served to realize some past profits and redeploy to cash or shorter-term fixed income.

But if you are younger—or if you are older, well diversified and can endure greater volatility—you may view the recent sell-off as a buying opportunity. And some advisors who rebalanced client portfolios in January may see this moment as an early opportunity to harvest short-term losses for clients in taxable accounts.

Investors in this second group may also see the present moment as an opportune time to upgrade positions in their emerging market equity allocations. Compared to the S&P 500, EM equities trade at a lower multiple, are experiencing faster earnings growth and are poised to benefit from strong global gross domestic product (GDP) growth and a relatively benign U.S. dollar.

Right now, we may be at an important inflection point in emerging market equities, where value stocks, particularly in the higher-dividend-yielding segment of the market, begin once again to outperform EM growth stocks. In four of the last five years, for example, the MSCI EM Value Index underperformed the MSCI EM Growth Index. But year-to-date that has reversed, with MSCI EM Value outperforming MSCI EM Growth, while the MSCI Emerging Markets High Dividend Yield Index is beating both.