Grab a cheap flight to the Philippines

The Philippines has benefitted from increased air travel in Southeast Asia, says Lars Henriksson. Here, he tips one low-cost airline to profit.

Until a couple of years ago, the Philippines was a market that most foreign investors happily gave a miss. It was a backwater, famous for being open only half the day (to lunch) and a place with which a leading Western investment bank was so displeased after the Asian financial crisis in 1997/98 that it sold its brokerage operations for a song to its local management.

During my Asian studies, we spent an awful lot of time trying to figure what went wrong with the Philippines. How had one of the richest countries in the region in 1960 turned into the basket case of the 1990s?

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Lars is an emerging-markets expert, with many years of 'on the ground' experience hunting down profit opportunities in Asia. Lars spent ten years living in Malaysia and Thailand, seeking out strategic opportunities, before moving to London to manage the Oracle Asia Absolute Fund. In short, Lars has real knowledge of where the opportunities in Asia are.