BOSTON, MA – 01/28/21 – Beyond Borders Investment Strategies, LLC (BBIS) announced today that the firm was added to the New England Impact Investor list by the New England Impact Investing Initiative (NEIII). Since its founding in 2016, NEIII has focused on building “a thriving and diverse regional impact investing industry by fostering connections, knowledge sharing, and talent development.”
Vitaly Veksler, BBIS’ Founder and CEO, stated, “It is an honor to be added to the New England Impact Investor list of companies.”
BBIS pursues a strategy that was described as unique by a number of institutional and private investors. The firm aims to earn attractive returns while making the world a better place in the process. It specializes in managing portfolios built from single-country equity ETFs of developed, frontier, and emerging market economies. BBIS aims to buy these ETFs at valuations that are significantly lower than their historical averages. These opportunities most often occur in countries that have recently undergone economic, financial, or political crises, or where stock market valuations were low due to suppressed demand for goods or commodities exported by these nations.
Beyond Borders Investment Strategies’ Triple Bottom Line
Goal 1: Earning Attractive Returns While Lowering Risks: The firm aims to earn attractive returns for clients over the market cycle. BBIS often achieves this goal when valuations of the undervalued ETFs in its portfolios revert to the long-term historical levels, and, on occasion, jumping above these levels. Through the use of the macroeconomic and political country analyses, BBIS aims to improve returns by avoiding markets that deserve to trade at low valuations, so-called “value traps.” The firm reduces its client portfolios’ investment risks by diversifying the portfolios’ composition among and within countries. It diversifies the portfolios among countries by not investing more than 10% of portfolios in any one country and keeping most country positions significantly below this maximum. For comparison, the weight of Chinese stocks in the MSCI Emerging Markets Value Weighted Index that BBIS’ Emerging & Frontier Market Country Value Equity strategy competes against is higher than 32% as of the end of 2020. Adverse developments in China’s stock markets may seriously impact investors benchmarking their portfolios closely to the index. BBIS also diversifies the portfolios’ holdings within countries to eliminate individual companies’ idiosyncratic risks by investing via single-country ETFs composed of dozens and hundreds of stocks.
Goal 2: Helping Countries Recover from Crises: BBIS aims to help countries’ stock markets stabilize, companies start expanding their operations and hiring people, and the countries’ citizens emerge from crises. Importantly, by using single-country ETFs, the firm buys shares of all large and medium-sized public companies and can help a very large number of their employees and their families return to normalcy. BBIS can even help people in their communities who do not work for the companies through the virtuous income multiplier effect. For comparison, stock pickers usually invest in several companies per country and can help a much smaller group of people.
Goal 3: Strengthening security around the World: BBIS aims to strengthen global and regional security by reducing militant nationalism that often impacts people within crisis-afflicted countries and sometimes spills onto the international arena in the form of terrorism or war.
Vitaly Veksler added, “I have developed Goals 2 and 3 of BBIS’ Triple Bottom Line after observing as a youth the devastating impact of a massive economic crisis on ordinary people in post-Soviet Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Inadequate pensions pushed older people to the brink of death from hunger, lack of employment opportunities forced women into prostitution, and a crime wave reduced men’s life expectancy to below 60 years. Also, the rise of militant nationalism almost brought ultranationalists with aggressive international expansion goals to power. Investments from domestic and, especially, foreign investors were of the utmost importance in ending the monstrous crisis. I have seen the incredible power of investments in ending a crisis in one nation. I started BBIS decades later to help people in crisis-stricken countries worldwide to get back to normalcy by investing in their economies in the time of need.”
To see the NEIII New England Impact Investor list, please Click Here
To read a white paper on BBIS’ impact goals titled “We Will Not Leave You Behind: Economic, Social and Political Impact of Investing via Single-Country Equity ETFs in Countries During and After Major Crises” written by Vitaly Veksler in February 2019, please Click Here
Advisor Perspectives, a leading interactive publisher for wealth managers and financial advisors, published an article based on the above-mentioned white paper in November 2019. To read the article titled “Helping Crisis-Stricken Countries Recover with Single-Country ETFs,” please Click Here
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