Veteran Investors Lay Out Options for Long-Term Investments

(Bloomberg) -- Investing for short-term returns this year might sometimes have seemed like an exercise in anticipating U.S. President Donald Trump’s next tweet. But some market players have still reserved time for ideas that go beyond the next headline on trade or manufacturing PMI.

The following are comments on long-term strategies from a number of veteran investors.

New Frontiers

Jim Rogers, chairman of Rogers Holdings Inc., says investing in crops could be a winner.

“Agriculture has been an unmitigated disaster for 30 to 35 years,” Rogers said at a briefing in Tokyo Sept. 12. There is a word in Japanese, ‘kiki’, “that disaster and opportunity are the same thing.” He said he was optimistic about long-term returns in the industry.

Beyond that, Rogers says he’s open to “new places.” After having already built positions in Russia, he’s looking at markets including Vietnam, Myanmar, Zimbabwe and Venezuela. And he’s keeping an eye on developments on the Korean peninsula, where some day barriers between north and south could come down.

“It’s going to be the most exciting place in the world for the next 10 or 20 years -- when the 38 parallel is completely open,” said Rogers, an investment veteran who declined to say how much he now manages.

Golden View

Mark Mobius has his eyes set on gold.

“Because all of these cyber currencies are coming out, so the money supply is expanding at an incredible rate. Nobody knows how much money is out there,” Mobius, who set up Mobius Capital Partners LLP last year after three decades at Franklin Templeton Investments, said in an Aug. 20 interview in Tokyo. “What you can depend on is gold, really.”

Perhaps befitting his reputation as an evangelist for emerging-markets, he was still confident in their attraction thanks to trend growth rates. He sees evolution, however, in how the asset class is conceived.

Because many emerging-market stocks are listed in New York or London, and a number of American companies that generate over 50% of earnings from developing nations, “it’s getting more differentiated,” he said.

Small Appeal

Graham McCraw, equity investment specialist based in Edinburgh for Aberdeen Standard Investments, made his first trip to Asia in September to address a spike in inquiries from clients on small-cap stocks.

“There’s been a big uptick in the last six to 12 months from institutional clients,” McCraw said in a Sept. 11 interview in Tokyo. “Investors are looking for just different asset classes.”

Small-cap stocks have traditionally been shunned by institutional investors, on the view they tend to be riskier than large-cap ones. “It seems that that attitude is potentially changing,” McCraw said.

Investors with large-cap only portfolios are missing out on 70% of investment opportunities, according to McCraw.

Beyond Traditional

Matteo Germano at Amundi Asset Management, a unit of one of Europe’s biggest asset managers, cites alternative assets as a key investment target.

“We strongly believe that alternative assets such as factor investments and real assets will become an increasingly important asset class over the coming years, as investors seek diversity and new potential sources of return amid expected lower returns on traditional asset classes,” Germano, head of multi-asset at Amundi, said in an emailed interview Sept. 3.

To contact the reporter on this story: Min Jeong Lee in Tokyo at mlee754@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Lianting Tu at ltu4@bloomberg.net, Christopher Anstey

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