Maurits Pot, Founder and CIO of Dawn Global discusses the state of Emerging Markets, opportunities beyond China, as well as key benefits and differentiators of the Asian Growth Cubs ETF.
The Asian Growth Cubs ETF, launched in June of 2021 and sub-advised by London-based Kingsway Capital, is not your average EM ETF. It is the first actively managed, thematic ETF focused exclusively on Southeast Asia. While many emerging market ETFs are passive and have heavy allocations to China and India, CUBS zeros in on the next generation of emerging markets for long-term growth and outperformance.
Designed to provide exposure to historically difficult-to-access markets, CUBS invests exclusively in publicly-traded companies in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan, Philippines, and Vietnam. These digitally-enabled economies represent over 860 million people, over 350 million people with smartphone access, and a GDP equivalent to India.
Pot believes that many EM indices and ETFs provide inadequate coverage of the rapidly growing Southeast Asia region, and that advisors can leverage CUBS to fill that hole in client portfolios. As an actively managed solution, CUBS’ investment strategy combines a top-down quantitative company screen and ESG filter with a qualitative bottom-up company analysis. Rebalanced semi-annually, the ETF’s diversified portfolio is focused on capturing secular growth trends and is biased towards technology, healthcare, digital banking, consumer goods.
Maurits Pot founded Dawn Global in 2021, and previously was a public and private equity investment partner at Kingsway Capital, a leading frontier emerging markets investment fund with over $2 billion of AUM, where he has represented investors on the boards of several emerging market companies. Maurits started his career in M&A at Goldman Sachs and following by commodity trading at Vitol. Maurits earned a BA in Economics (Magna Cum Laude) from Middlebury College, Vermont. Maurits has been active in emerging markets for over 15 years, having worked in the financial, government and non-profit sectors across different emerging market countries.
- The case for the Asian Growth Cubs, and why Cubs is a critical yet untapped EM diversification beyond China
- Why EM indices are broken, including ex-China indices which still hold more China exposure than Cubs exposure
- How Southeast Asia is different to the precedent set by China and India, with Southeast Asian companies preferring local over global listings (only 3 ADRs in all of Southeast Asia)
- How the Asian Growth Cubs are at the heart of 1 billion new Asian consumers joining the middle class by 2030
- The role of accelerating digital adoption in driving growth in Southeast Asia; Facebook forecasts that 80% of Southeast Asia consumers will be digital by the end of 2021
- The active thematic investment process behind CUBS and how CUBS fits into a broader EM allocation