Tag: business

Foreign investors move out of Indian stocks for now but future is brighter than ever for India’s economy

~ Patrickhdjones ~ Leave a comment

Indian stocks fell out of favor with overseas investors last month, with markets cooling slightly after a stellar 2017 performance. New data showed foreign institutional investors pulled out $1.5 billion from Indian shares in February, following the market correction in the U.S. which hurt global indices, on top of fears concerning the Punjab National Bank, which is at the centre of a $1.8 billion fraud case.

Gautam Chhaochharia, head of research at UBS Securities India said: “Our global strategists like Korea, Indonesia and Brazil the most.” He added: “A year ago, India was the market with least hassles in its path, but now, other emerging markets look better off in comparison.” Indeed, Brazilian and even Russian indices rode out the last month far better than their Indian counterparts. This Monday the NIFTY50 made a small recovery heading back to the 10,600 mark.

However these figures don’t tell the full story. Regardless of the recent blip in the equity market, India’s economy is still powering ahead as one of the fastest growing in the world, with plenty of praise being handed to the nations leader Narendra Modi for his implemented economic reforms which are making India more business friendly.

Indeed, India has plenty of reasons for positivity on the economic front. The country has vast supplies of natural resources which are relatively unexplored, and also has a huge need for new infrastructure projects, not only physical, but also in terms of digitisation due to its massive rural population. This presents major opportunities to foreign investors seeking to take advantage of a rapidly developing emerging economy. As digitisation expands it will bring benefits not least to these more isolated communities but also to foreign companies, because more access to the internet will draw in more and more e-commerce customers, a trend which Walmart has already taken an interest in. In 2013, India had 30 to 40 million internet users, while today the number is estimated to be over 400 million. Once again, these shifts will undoubtedly be a major pull for overseas investors.

On top of this, India has a flourishing middle class. By 2020, India is projected to be the world’s third largest middle class consumer market behind China and North America. By 2030, India is likely to surpass both countries with consumer spending of nearly $13 trillion. The Indian population’s interest in investing in stocks has also grown exponentially – domestic mutual funds got a whopping $20 billion in 2017, around double from the year before, mostly due to average (non-institutional) investors, who were looking to take advantage of the awesome stock market rally during the year, instead of sticking with more traditional choices like gold or real estate to put their cash into.

All signs point to a thriving economy in the long term. Indeed, the latest set of economic data for Q4 2017 showed India’s economy expanded 7.2 percent year-on-year for the period. That is well above the upwardly revised 6.5 percent advanced in the previous period and above market expectations of 6.9 percent.

Overall, whether foreign institutional investors are confident on Indian equity markets or not right now, the future looks bright. All of the fundamentals are in place which make India one of the hottest places on earth to invest.

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India has a problem with its banking sector and it’s beating down equities

~ Patrickhdjones ~ Leave a comment

India is suffering from contagion in its banking system, with a mounting pile of non-performing loans, poor accounting standards and growing evidence of major banking fraud, unearthed over the last few weeks by government agencies.

India’s ratio of bad loans (as a percentage of total loans) is among the worst in the G20, just behind Russia and ahead of Brazil, Turkey and Indonesia, according to the IMF, though back in 2009 it was among the best in the world in this regard.

Standard & Poors Global Ratings said the recently detected fraud at Punjab National Bank underscores and urgent need for reforms in public sector institutions, with further losses for these banks being expected. Banking stocks were among the biggest fallers on the NIFTY50 last week, on top of significant monthly losses.

It’s an issue that the Narendra Modi’s Union government is taking steps to address. In October last year, the government unveiled a massive bailout plan to inject Rs2.11 lakh crore (equivalent to around $32.43 billion) into banks over the next 2 years to improve their capital positions. Stress tests conducted by the IMF last year on India’s 15 largest banks showed Indian lenders fell behind their emerging market peers including Indonesia, China and Russia in this regard. However it wasn’t all bad news – the IMF described 64 percent of the assets of the top 15 banks as ‘resilient’.

There are reasons to suspect that many more bad loans have not yet been accounted for. The latest corporate results from India’s largest lender (State Bank of India) showed the bank posted surprise losses of higher-than-anticipated bad loans, though officials from the bank claimed the worst is over.

The problems in banking have crept into the stock market too, unnerving foreign investors. If India wants to realise its true potential as an economy then the authorities will need to take a firm stance on the matter.

JPMorgan Co-President warns of 40% correction in stocks – is he too pessimistic, or bearish?

~ Patrickhdjones ~ Leave a comment

JPMorgan Chase Co-President Daniel Pinto thinks the stock market is set for a 40 percent fall in the next 2-3 years, a move down which would end up wiping out the last 2 year’s of gains in the market rally stateside.

Speaking to Bloomberg Television, Pinto said: “We know there will be a correction at some point”. He added: “We are at an interesting time. We are 2-3 years probably until the end of the cycle and markets are going to be nervous. Nervous to anything that relates to inflation, nervous to anything that relates to growth. And I think tariffs – if they go a lot beyond what has been announced – it is something that will concern markets about future growth.”

These are big ‘ifs’ though. Trump wont necessarily escalate trade action at a more rapid rate. Indeed, as you can read in the final paragraph of this article, the administration has left the door open for other countries to adjust their own trade practices in return for tariffs being modified or removed completely. If other nations including China stop flooding the market with so much cheap steel, helping the U.S. to address its colossal trade deficit, Trump may be willing to soften more, and this would be another major boon for the markets, which are already starting to benefit from the Republican tax reform package passed in December last year.

So much depends on whether trade relations deterioriate further, and whether other leaders including China’s Xi Jinping are willing to concede to a more aggressive U.S. trade policy, or fight back even harder. Given how much both countries depend on eachother economically, its more likely that both leaders will be pragmatic over the issue, but if they aren’t, then Pinto’s forecast could come true.

For now though, even despite worries concerning inflation, the speed of Federal Reserve interest rate rises, the withdrawal of monetary easing and the prospect of another major correction in the markets like the one we saw in late January / early February, stock prices keep rising and indices keep moving upwards. The chart below shows how quickly the benchmark S&P500 index is recovering after that sharp fall earlier this year, even with all the noise in the press about chaos in the White House and warning signs in the economy.

SP500

Robust financial results for American companies through the first quarter of the year show us that the underlying fundamentals of the U.S. economy are strong, which is why investors keep buying back in. By February 8th this year, 322 S&P500 companies had reported quarterly results during the latest earnings season, and 78 percent of them beat Wall Street estimates. According to Thomson Reuters data, that was the best rate of above-estimate earnings since Q3 2009!

Besides this, the latest labour market data released today showed the U.S. economy added 313,000 new jobs in February, the biggest gain since mid-2016 and a reflection of the strongest labor market in two decades.

Then there’s the North Korea breakthrough – whereby Trump is set to meet Kim Jong Un in May, the first ever meeting between a sitting U.S. President and sitting DPRK leader in history. If relations between the 2 were normalised, this would be a huge relief to Asian stock markets and those in the U.S. boosting investor sentiment even more.

Overall, I’d argue Pinto’s case looks a little bit too bearish considering the data we are working with right now, but anything could happen in the next year or 2.

The American oil industry is booming and that may undermine OPEC

~ Patrickhdjones ~ Leave a comment

America may well become the world’s leading energy producer by next year, according to the International Energy Agency.

The latest IEA report said that in the 3 months to November last year, U.S. crude output was seen increasing by 846,000 barrels a day.

The data revealed how fast rising production in non-OPEC countries (led by the U.S.) is likely to grow by more than demand this year. The relentless rise of American crude supply could undermine OPEC efforts to re-balance the global oil market, and may see the U.S. overtaking Saudi Arabia and Russia (two of the world’s largest producers) in oil production by the end of 2019.

Head of the oil industry and markets division at the IEA Neil Atkinson said: “We are seeing United States production rising very, very dramatically before our very eyes and that’s likely to continue in 2018.”

One reason this trend looks set to continue may be due to the Trump administration’s willingness to open up more areas in the U.S. to oil production. The U.S. Department of the Interior announced that it may conduct 16 auctions to open new oil and gas wells along the Atlantic and Pacific continental shelves. It will also sell 31 new leases near Alaska and in the Gulf of Mexico.

U.S. energy exports now compete with Middle East oil for buyers in Asia, and daily trading volumes of U.S. oil futures contracts have doubled in the past 10 years, according to the CME Group. This indicates just how much America has grown as a major player in world energy markets.

Conversely, the latest OPEC report showed production for the members of the group was little changed in January as they continued to limit their output for a second year in order to balance an oversupplied market. However, key members like Iraq raised their output in the first month of 2018.

Crude prices have jumped nearly 50 per cent since mid 2017 reaching highs of over $70 a barrel but have since lost steam, now sitting at around $62 p/b.

Patrick Jones

UBS say Worries on China’s Debt are Overblown as it Sets Up Exclusive Investment Fund

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Swiss banking giant UBS is introducing a new private fund for institutional and high net-worth individuals with an interest in investing in China’s booming equity markets.

Having obtained a new permit granting them increased access to stock markets in the country, UBS is introducing the first mainland China stock fund owned by a company outside China. The UBS China Equity Private Fund Series 1 has completed it’s initial offering, and will help its members to invest in China’s thriving stock markets, which for many years were available only to Chinese citizens.

China’s markets are dominated by state-owned businesses, but private companies are starting to make headway too, particularly in sectors like healthcare. Not only this, but the central government has made reforms in order to let foreign investors trade on more-restricted stock exchanges like the Shenzhen and Shanghai exchanges (which contain so called ‘A-Shares’ – the stocks that this new fund from UBS is mostly interested in).

Historically, these shares were only available for purchase by mainland citizens, due to China’s skepticism about foreign investment, but the country is continuing to open up its markets to overseas wealth.

UBS has a long history in China. UBS AG was China’s first qualified foreign institutional investor, as approved by the China Securities Regulatory Commission in 2003 – a massive deal for a foreign bank!

The fund’s manager, Zizhen Wang, said “From a long-term perspective, UBS sees sustainable growth in the Chinese economy and opportunities in the A-share market,” he added, “Blue-chip stocks are fairly valued and leading companies across numerous sectors are enhancing their international competitiveness.”

In another vote of confidence for the economy, UBS also said they were less worried about China’s debt burden than other banks. Speaking to Bloomberg, Jason Bedford, a Hong Kong-based UBS analyst, said a financial systemic credit event in China is “very unlikely”. He added that a lot of the items on China’s balance sheet were less risky than many thought, even the asset-backed securities.

He said “A significant portion of off-balance sheet exposures are composed of benign, no-risk or low-risk items.” He added, “The failure to distinguish the risk between these items has often led to an exaggerated risk perception among many market watchers.”

It’s no secret that the Chinese economy is hooked on debt, especially in its state-owned enterprises. Lending in the country has grown rapidly over recent years, as household and corporate wealth has ballooned. China’s citizens and businesses have been looking for higher returns in a system where bank interest rates have been held down.

The government is aware of this, and looks to be taking steps to deleverage the economy by cracking down on certain problem-areas, including the booming online lending market.

Just this week, CNBC reported that a top-level Chinese government body issued an urgent notice on Tuesday to provincial (local) governments, urging them to suspend approval for the setting up of new internet micro-lenders. They also apparently told local regulators to restrict granting new approvals for micro-loan firms to conduct lending across regions.

These kinds of businesses have grown massively in popularity over recent years, by giving credit to people who couldn’t get loans at state banks, which tend to favour bigger corporate clients instead.

Xi Jinping has made clear that he backs the idea of deleveraging so as to ‘cleanse risk’ from China’s financial system, and the governments actions so far have been applauded by analysts. But though reforms are clearly in motion, whether this will be enough to offset China’s already hugely leveraged economy is less certain.

As we saw in the case of the financial crisis in 2008 where top Wall Street firms were leveraged (indebted) to an obscene degree, a high amount of total debt can signal systemic financial fragility. When everyone owes everyone else money, a negative shock to the economy, or even just a spontaneous panic can upset the system, by causing a lot of borrowers to default at the same time. When financial firms are highly leveraged, it also makes it easier to have a bank run or a similar liquidity crisis. During the financial crisis, this was certainly the case. China must avoid this kind of situation at all costs.

Though UBS are bullish, other data shows the future looks bleak for the world’s second largest economy. Bloomberg economists Fielding Chen and Tom Orlik estimate that China’s total debt will reach 327% of GDP by 2022, a staggering level which could make it harder for the country to avoid a financial crisis, especially considering actual economic expansion is set to slow to 5.8% in 2022 from 6.7% in 2016, compounding matters further, and as growth continues to slow while debt continues to rise, the risk of a collapse in asset prices looms. This would spell big trouble for an economy that the world depends on for so much.

Patrick Jones