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Tuesday, 3 May 2016

Fund boosts exposure to Egypt, frontier markets, beats index handily

Making money investing in Egyptian equities: Bloomberg’s Sangwon Yoon profiles Duet Mena, the Dubai-based frontier fund, which has reported annualised returns of 8.9% since its inception in January 2013, compared to a yearly losses of 2% posted by the benchmark MSCI Frontier Emerging Markets Index. Duet Mena invests in “exotic” frontier markets including Pakistan, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, Bloomberg says. The fund’s CEO, Hedi Ben Mlouka, said he boosted exposure to Egyptian equities to 18% from 4% after the EGP devaluation, “seeing the move as the start of a normalization of its foreign capital repatriation timeline.” Ben Mlouka says “there is an interesting pattern we are seeing in frontier markets, which are headed in the right direction, toward liberalization and privatization … There is a realization there that you can’t continue to run these countries the way they have been.”

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