Investing Basics: Investing in Asia with investment trusts

How closed-ended funds can help investors get exposure to Asian companies…

 
Back in 1700, Asian economies made up close to 60% of global gross domestic product (GDP), with the then-Chinese and Indian empires between them having the two largest economies in the world.

By 1950 that figure had dropped to 15% as, over the preceding 250 years, European countries became the focal point of the industrial revolution and America slowly emerged as the world’s largest economy.

The post-World War II era has seen this dynamic shift once more. By the end of the 20th century Asia made up a third of global GDP, and consultancy group McKinsey estimates it will hit the 50% mark by 2040.

This growth has been spearheaded by companies across the continent, many of which are leaders in their respective fields. In 2020, 43% of the world’s 5,000 largest companies were based in Asia and, in the same year, there were more Fortune 500 companies based in Hong Kong and China than in the US for the first time.
 

Investing in Asian economic growth

 
Such growth has resulted in several bursts of investor interest over the past 40 years. Japan’s rise in the 1980s saw huge sums of cash flowing into the country. A stock market and housing crash in the latter half of that decade and early 1990s, along with a subsequent period of economic stagnation, has tampered that enthusiasm to a large degree.

A similar phenomenon took place in the 1990s as a brief period of overexuberance saw massive investor interest in emerging markets in South East Asia, including Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand.

A market crash in 1997 led many investors to pull out of those countries. Those that continued to focus on Asia tended to devote most of their energy to China. From 1990 to 2020, the country’s economy increased 41-fold in size, averaging annual GDP growth of 13.2%.

It’s for this reason that most people think of investing in Asia as being largely a Chinese phenomenon. That’s understandable given the country’s impressive growth over the past three decades and the gradual opening of its markets to foreign investors reflected in its increasing weighing in global and regional indices.

Having said that, other countries in the region continue to attract investment, including Korea, Taiwan, and Japan and the countries that stung investors back in the 1990s. India has also started to become mainstream and an appealing domestic economy, with the country’s GDP more than doubling from 2009 to 2019.
 

What do Asian stock markets look like?

 
Before describing Asian equities markets, it’s worth defining what we actually mean by ‘Asia’ in the context of investing.

This may sound like an odd point to make but when fund managers or individual investors talk about ‘investing in Asia’, they’re usually referring to the Asia Pacific region, which is East and South-East Asia, as well as Oceania.

In more concrete terms, that means countries like Australia, China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, India, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, and the Philippines.

Funds will have different mandates that may preclude them from investing in certain countries. For example, an Asia Pacific ex Japan mandate would tend to include all of those countries except Japan. Some investors will also allocate funds to companies listed outside of the continent, in the US or UK for example, if those firms generate the bulk of their revenues from countries in Asia.

Despite these exclusions, the countries that investors do look at are still hugely varied, both in terms of their economies and the companies listed in them.

For instance, Malaysia’s largest listed companies look a bit like their UK counterparts, with lots of financial and commodities companies in the mix. In contrast, the top end of China’s stock market contains a lot more internet-oriented companies than Malaysia.
 

 

Why it’s hard to invest in Asian stocks directly

 
As much as some individual investors might want to put money directly into companies in Asia, it’s a difficult thing to do.

Even developed markets in the region, like Japan and South Korea, are often inaccessible to regular people, as investment platforms don’t offer them. Those that do also tend to charge high fees for access and impose large minimum order sizes – plus they’ll usually only have a small selection of stocks on offer.

Countries that fall into the emerging market bucket are unlikely to be available at all, with the exception of depository receipts (ADRs, GDRs) which are listings of such companies on US or UK exchanges. For instance, at the time of writing there appears to be no investment platform in the UK offering retail customers direct access to the Malaysian, Thai, or Indonesian stock markets.

This simple problem aside, the other difficulty individual investors may face is actually finding the best Asian companies to invest in.

It’s not uncommon for companies across the region to issue financial reports that are only partially translated into English or not translated at all. This is a common feature of companies listed in Mainland China. Given these are perhaps the most important documents you’ll need to weigh up whether you want to invest, that’s likely to be a problem.

Third-party sources of information can also be hard to find, at least in English.

In short, it’s both practically difficult to invest in Asia as most platforms don’t have connections to exchanges in the continent and, from an analytical perspective, evaluating prospective investments is much harder than it would be for UK or US companies.
 

Using investment trusts to invest in Asia

 
Investment trusts can help solve these problems and are a useful tool for anyone looking to get exposure to Asia in their portfolio.

As they’re listed in the UK, they’re easily accessible to investors and as a rule don’t carry the same high fees that investing directly in Asian stocks does. They also tend to hold a diverse range of companies, meaning you can easily get exposure to a mix of companies in the region via one investment.

Beyond that, trusts give you access to a team of regional specialists, who can identify good opportunities in local markets. This is particularly important for emerging markets and smaller companies in developed ones, which tend to be off the radar of regular investors and are much harder to do due diligence on.

These sorts of companies are often out of the reach of large funds too, as their size means they can’t buy their shares without taking a huge stake in the company. Trusts are typically smaller and can be nimbler with their investments as a result.

Finally, trust managers can take an active approach to the region. This means they can take a broad or more refined approach to the market and don’t have to stick to tracking a benchmark, which may not take the sort of positions an investor wants.
 

The Asian investment trust sector

 
There are currently 14 investment trusts focused on Asian markets. This doesn’t include other trusts which take a country-specific approach to individual Asian countries, the majority of which invest in either China or Japan.

Those 14 trusts take divergent approaches to the market. The Association of Investment Companies (AIC) breaks them down into three categories – Asia Pacific, Asia Pacific Equity Income, and Asia Pacific Smaller Companies.

Asia Pacific trusts tend to invest in large cap stocks across the region, whereas the other two, as their names suggest, tend to focus on providing dividends to shareholders or generating higher total returns by allocating funds to small cap stocks.

To give some examples of this, Schroder Asian Total Return (ATR) aims to deliver capital growth to shareholders by focusing mainly on mid and small-cap companies. The trust also uses derivatives to try and eliminate macroeconomic risk.

Conversely, Aberdeen Asian Income (AAIF) looks to provide high and growing dividends to shareholders by investing in companies which pay out to shareholders. The trust has historically made its dividend payments from the income its underlying holdings provide, but it does have the ability to pay dividends to shareholders from capital if need be.

At the time of writing, fees for the trusts range from 0.74% to 1.13%. It’s also worth keeping in mind that some trusts will have a performance fee for beating a certain metric and this will result in paying more than the trust’s stated ongoing costs. There is also some level of currency risk given that the trust’s underlying investments aren’t likely to be denominated in sterling.

Comparing trusts to their open-ended counterparts in this area isn’t easy because the latter are not segmented in the same way that trusts are by the AIC but there appears to be a clear advantage to the closed-end structure. The most reasonable comparison to make is probably between trusts in the AIC’s Asia Pacific sector and open-ended funds in the Investment Association’s Asia Pacific Including Japan segment.

Looking at those two groups over the past 5 years, we find the trusts averaged total share price returns, in sterling terms, of 107.7%¹. Open-ended funds produced equivalent returns over the same time period of 74.8%.

That disparity may be down to structural differences between the two different sets of funds. Trusts are closed-ended, meaning they do not have to carry any sizeable holdings in liquid assets in order to meet redemptions. Open-ended funds usually do and that means they are hit by cash drag.

Redemptions also mean that open-ended funds often have to contend with lots of redemptions when the market hits a rough patch, which can easily put more downward pressure on performance. This is not something that trusts have to deal with and it means they’re often better able to ride out any periods of poor performance in the market.

Lastly, trusts can borrow money to enhance returns – a practice known as gearing – which means they can boost their performance if they make good investment decisions. Open-ended funds cannot do this, which means any positive returns won’t be given a lift in the same way that they would for a trust.