At long last, after many a fund manager coffee session, I'm talking to a big brand with a positive focus on local financial geography.
We are not talking about the opportunities of the old world of New York and London, or the new world of Mumbai and Shanghai.
For Gadir Abu Leil-Cooper and the Barings Asset Management brand, they are talking up Cairo and Abu Dhabi as the new kids on the investment bloc. For Barings, Mena is the new frontier.
"From both a secular and tactical perspective, we see Mena as an investment opportunity, and the timing is right for investing now," Gadir said confidently. Could this be Arab-bias from the Nablus-born, Anglo-Arab educated Abu Leil-Cooper?
Not a bit of it, "our beliefs are rooted in the five cornerstones of our investment model, and [the] Mena [region] satisfies each factor," she said.
Firstly, you have "growth". The Mena region's growth story is best summed up by the economists view that the Mena region's population will add on another "two Egypt's" over the next two decades.
That's a lot of youngsters, that's a lot more urbanisation and that's a lot more consumerism, and therein lies a growth story.
Secondly, you have liquidity. Top-down, the most obvious local liquidity tap is found in the local sovereign wealth funds (SWF's). While they may not make investments for the sake of it, they will make local investments where they make sense. Bottom-up, a measure of local Mena liquidity is found in the fact that, compared to mature market economies, "Arabs are underleveraged" Gadir said.
She added, "That's a lot of fridges, cars and household items to finance, one reason why we will be looking at the region's banks as part of the Mena growth story."
Corner three is the currency, whose dollar peg reduces currency risk.
The fourth corner lies in management. Back to the SWFs, where Gadir points to its first-class staffing programme; paraphrased: they don't recruit "mugs".
More importantly, according to Gadir "it means that indirectly the region supports each other," as the SWF's pick up on local opportunities.
The final corner is valuations. This brings us back to the connection between the secular and tactical opportunity.
The "secular" play is largely driven by population as the table shows.
North America has 5.1 per cent of the world's population, 28.2 per cent of global productivity, and 48.3 per cent of the MSCI global equity index.
One area of common "fund manager consensus" is the belief that emerging markets will start playing the catch-up game over the next few years and, for now, the MSCI Emerging Markets index is a better bet than the global MSCI. The reason is clear in the table.
The Mena numbers are embedded in CEEMA. Where's that you ask? It is "Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa."
They don't have their own football team, reminding me of the 1980s Asian crisis in which some "Pacific" funds found a way of putting US stocks into the funds because of the US western seaboard!
Creativity
Gadir's creativity isn't as blatant, but her best-of-Mena list does include Turkey, as well as the Gulf region, Egypt, Jordan and Morocco.
"Any good fund needs to have a wide selection in order for the five factors within our model to have a foundation to work from," she said.
So the secular story is a sub-set of the future strength of emerging markets with the Mena region playing its part as one of the faster growing sub-sets.
The writer is chairman of Mondial Financial Partners International
