It’s a mouthful, so it’s best to go by its ticker symbol and its accompanying index: The Emerging Markets Internet & E-Commerce ETF (EMQQ 30,09 +0,86 +2,94%) was created in 2014. It’s target is the future of shopping. Most of that future is being driven in Asia. With 77% of the fund’s investments in Asia (read: China), EMQQ is betting on a rising middle class, and the upward trend of mobile technologies.
Company founder Kevin Carter spoke with us recently about the fund’s 39 underlying assets, and why he is not afraid to stay laser focused on a niche. “The growth in the emerging markets is in the consumer segment of the economy; it’s a well-covered story. But just as we are shifting our shopping from Walmart to Amazon, the same thing is happening in emerging markets,” Carter says. “The exception is that many of those countries don’t have the Walmarts and the SUVs to go shopping in, so the growth in ecommerce has been explosive there.”
EMQQ is up 5.98% over the last three years while the much more diversified MSCI Emerging Markets Index is down around 3%.
“That’s the problem with diversifying,” Carter says. “Sometimes you own the asset classes that don’t do as well as others.”