Five funds to help you invest in a new Europe

Growth stocks are a much bigger part of European markets than many investors realise. These five funds will help you buy in.

Canal in Amsterdam © KOEN VAN WEEL/ANP/AFP via Getty Images
The Netherlands is more important to European markets than Spain
(Image credit: © KOEN VAN WEEL/ANP/AFP via Getty Images)

Investors sometimes use national stockmarkets as a shorthand for their views about a country, but that doesn’t mean that a given market tells you much about the domestic economy. Take the FTSE 100. It’s the key UK equity index but it’s full of firms that don’t do a huge amount of business in Britain. It’s just a collection of companies that happen to be listed in London. The same is true for many European markets and for regional indices such as MSCI Europe.

That matters because markets get hooked on narratives, and the dominant one today is that the US means growth, while Europe is boring (if cheap). These narratives are hard to dislodge, but over time they can decline in usefulness. This might be the case in Europe, according to a recent report from analysts at Morgan Stanley. They argue that European markets are changing, with new sectors becoming more important.

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David C. Stevenson
Contributor

David Stevenson has been writing the Financial Times Adventurous Investor column for nearly 15 years and is also a regular columnist for Citywire. He writes his own widely read Adventurous Investor SubStack newsletter at davidstevenson.substack.com

David has also had a successful career as a media entrepreneur setting up the big European fintech news and event outfit www.altfi.com as well as www.etfstream.com in the asset management space. 

Before that, he was a founding partner in the Rocket Science Group, a successful corporate comms business. 

David has also written a number of books on investing, funds, ETFs, and stock picking and is currently a non-executive director on a number of stockmarket-listed funds including Gresham House Energy Storage and the Aurora Investment Trust. 

In what remains of his spare time he is a presiding justice on the Southampton magistrates bench.