Emerging market

It's time now for Emerging Economies with a focus on Latin America.

As always, Professor Lyle White.

He is a faculty member at the Gordon Institute of Business Science.

Yeah, they're all the rage in 2026, of course.

Yeah, so pretty good time to have emerging market exposure.

Question for you, how would you, like, say you wanted emerging markets exposure in your portfolio, how would you go about achieving

that? The same way our clients do, right? The ETFs we use for emerging market exposure includes I think it's 3000 individual companies from mega cap all the way down to small cap.

Certainly given the illiquidity and political constraints overseas, wouldn't try to get too sexy there.

Yeah.

i think you'd almost have to right you're probably not going direct to emerging market countries to buy securities in the home markets um you know adrs probably are really limiting so you go broad market etf get as much exposure as you can so vanguard i shares definitely qualify as broad market s p definitely qualify as broad market highly respected brands credentialed investment you know teams um what if i told you that one of these firms had their emerging market fund go up 14% year to date.

And the other one had their ETF in emerging markets go up 26% year to date.

Hello everyone, welcome to this new episode of Microwaves, focusing on the rise of AI and the energy shock in emerging economies.

Spring 2026 saw mounting risks, with zero in Iran, the closure of the Straits of Hormuz and soaring energy prices.

Yet, against all expectations, emerging economies withstood the shock remarkably well.

To understand this resilience, I'm joined today by Luc Apley and Hélène Drouot, both economists in the Emerging Economies team at BNP Paribas Economic Research.

Hello to you both.

Hello.

Luca, let's start with an overview.

First up, let's discuss something surprising.

[upbeat music] Hi, I'm Calz, and welcome to The Comparable, the series where we highlight the innovations and the innovators and investors shaping emerging markets.

Today, we're breaking down a growing asset class that is vital in emerging markets, but doesn't get nearly enough airtime: venture debt.

Every founder knows the equity story.

Raise a round, give up ownership, repeat, until you hopefully have some big event that returns money back to you and your investors, hopefully.

Before Alturia, Puneet spent years at Innoven Capital, building some of the earliest venture debt relationships in the market.

Very few people have watched this asset class grow up quite the way he has in India.

So today, we're getting into it, what venture debt actually is, how Alturia underwrites risk in the companies they lend to, and what players in other emerging markets can learn from this story.

Let's get into it.

On the podcast this week, I have a chance to talk to Omar Nagyal, who is the lead manager on the JP Morgan Emerging Market Dividend Income Investment Trust, which sits in the emerging market sector, has a market cap around 540 million, something like that, and has recently become a member of the FTSE 250 Index, a reflection of its growing size.

Now, it's not the largest investment trust in the sector.

It's not even the largest J.P. Morgan Emerging Markets Investment Trust.

And so the first question I'm going to start off with for you, Omar, is can you tell us exactly what the mandate for J.P. Morgan Emerging Markets Dividend Income is? I know you changed the name slightly recently.

And how that differs from the J.P. Morgan Emerging Markets Growth and Income Trust, the much larger vehicle in the sector you're in.

Sure thing.

Hi, great to be on the podcast.

Thanks for asking.

But there's also an election in Brazil coming up too.

So in emerging markets, I mean, do you see people trying to-

Wait, wait.

Wait, we, we, we gotta go.

The whole market's trying to kind of grasp, like, what is communication? How do we interpret this? We've had pending elections, midterms coming up.

I think you obviously brought up the Brazil election.

Emerging markets have been choppy.

Oh, gosh.

Nadya Nikova, I'm the CEO of Responsibility.

We are an almost 6 billion assets under management business focused on impact investing in emerging markets owned by M&G.

And we have been doing impact investing for over two decades.

And how on earth did you get there?

I don't know if you, how much do you keep a track on the sort of tech sector and the things going on in AI? Is that something that's on your radar? Yeah.

It certainly is from an operations perspective of how do we embed it in our business and what does it mean for our business model.

But also we invest in financial institutions and emerging markets.

What does it mean for disruption of the investing companies in our portfolios is something that we look at quite a lot.