BOSTON, MA – 10/18/16 – Beyond Borders Investment Strategies, LLC announced that Vitaly Veksler, the firm’s CEO and Portfolio Manager, participated in Cornell University’s 6th Annual Emerging Markets Conference in New York last Friday, October 14. The conference was organized by The Emerging Markets Institute (EMI) at the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University.
Vitaly Veksler said, “It was a pleasure to share my thoughts on countries to invest in during a panel titled Looking at Investment Opportunities in Emerging Markets. I also enjoyed listening to other presenters about their “war stories” of investing in emerging markets. It was great to share with the conference attendees and organizers a “war story” that I observed at a company where I worked before. It involved an investment in Yukos, one of the best-run and the most transparent Russian oil company in the early 2000s. The company was widely believed to be bankrupted due to the conflict between the company’s CEO and Russian authorities.
This experience made me question the wisdom of investing in individual stocks in emerging markets, at least as it relates to the funds that I manage. No matter how diligent investors in these countries are, they may not have full information about political, regulatory, taxation and other issues related to these companies. I thought a lot about the Yukos story and concluded that if I were to start a firm that would invest in emerging markets, I would rather use equity country funds than equities of individual companies as building blocks for the firm’s investment portfolios. An equity country fund’s price would not go down to zero if one company in the fund went bankrupt.
I founded Beyond Borders Investment Strategies more than a decade after the Yukos collapse, when single-country exchange traded funds (ETFs) that follow performance of stock markets in almost 50 countries, became available. I concluded my presentation at the conference with one of my favorite Nelson Mandela’s quotes, “You never lose. You either win or learn.”
Please let us know if you have questions about Beyond Borders Investment Strategies, LLC by sending a message to info@bbistrategies.com.
Vitaly Veksler said, “It was a pleasure to share my thoughts on countries to invest in during a panel titled Looking at Investment Opportunities in Emerging Markets. I also enjoyed listening to other presenters about their “war stories” of investing in emerging markets. It was great to share with the conference attendees and organizers a “war story” that I observed at a company where I worked before. It involved an investment in Yukos, one of the best-run and the most transparent Russian oil company in the early 2000s. The company was widely believed to be bankrupted due to the conflict between the company’s CEO and Russian authorities.
This experience made me question the wisdom of investing in individual stocks in emerging markets, at least as it relates to the funds that I manage. No matter how diligent investors in these countries are, they may not have full information about political, regulatory, taxation and other issues related to these companies. I thought a lot about the Yukos story and concluded that if I were to start a firm that would invest in emerging markets, I would rather use equity country funds than equities of individual companies as building blocks for the firm’s investment portfolios. An equity country fund’s price would not go down to zero if one company in the fund went bankrupt.
I founded Beyond Borders Investment Strategies more than a decade after the Yukos collapse, when single-country exchange traded funds (ETFs) that follow performance of stock markets in almost 50 countries, became available. I concluded my presentation at the conference with one of my favorite Nelson Mandela’s quotes, “You never lose. You either win or learn.”
Please let us know if you have questions about Beyond Borders Investment Strategies, LLC by sending a message to info@bbistrategies.com.
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