Invest where others won’t

Merryn Somerset Webb explains why there hasn't been a better time to invest in emerging markets in years.

Back in 2010 we thought about what might make good trades of the decade'. Bill Bonner thought the most obvious way to preserve capital over the ten years until 2020 would be to sell Treasuries and buy Japanese equities. That was hard to disagree with. But thinking just about equity markets, I thought it might also be a good idea to sell one more thing that everyone loved and buy one that most people rather disliked. So, I suggested selling emerging markets in the East and buying developed markets in the West (alongside Japan).

This was such a nutty contrarian suggestion at the time that even Bill, the greatest in-house contrarian a contrarian magazine could hope for, said he wasn't so sure it was a good idea. That may well turn out to be the case (2020 still being some time away and the world being a very uncertain place). But for now it's going pretty well.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.