Saudi Arabian equities, emerging market fixed income favoured by UBP fund selector | ZAWYA MENA Edition

Saudi Arabian equities, emerging market fixed income favoured by UBP fund selector | ZAWYA MENA Edition:

Many emerging market (EM) managers are increasing their allocations to Middle East and North Africa (MENA) markets, especially to Saudi Arabia, a fund selector from Swiss private bank Union Bancaire Privée (UBP) has told Zawya.

“People are more and more looking at frontier markets and how the indices are gradually incorporating those frontier markets, so we have been increasing research on MENA in the last few years, just to make sure we understand who the players are,” Cédric Le Berre, fund selector and portfolio manager at UBP said in an interview last week, noting that MENA remains a niche region for the bank’s clients.

Within the region, however, he said: “We favour Saudi Arabia, and this is where we see EM managers focusing and allocating money, partly because of the MSCI upgrade but also because the market is very liquid and very large in size, so people feel comfortable with that.”