Asia Emerging Markets Team

Investment principles & approach

Co-heads Ian Hargreaves and Will Lam have 53 years of industry experience between them, 49 of those working together at Invesco. They are supported by 11 other expert investors and analysts, all working to a clearly defined and proven strategy.

The team brings deep expertise across Asia, emerging markets, and innovative sectors such as Metaverse and AI, delivering high-conviction solutions tailored to clients’ evolving needs.

Their investment philosophy is based on managing a highly active portfolio of approximately 70 stocks, diversified across countries and sectors, using 4 key principles:

A contrarian approach, seeking bottom-up ideas in unloved parts of the market
A focus on valuation, with a belief that the most repeatable way to make money is to buy companies for less than they are really worth
A 3-5 year time horizon
A preference for conservative balance sheets

0:02
Hi, Will, Hi Ian.

0:04
Thanks for stopping by.

0:06
You have decades of experience in this industry.

0:09
Could you talk a little bit about the team and what you think really matters to making good investment decisions?

0:18
So we're a team of ten people. Ian and I have been working together since I joined Invesco in 2006. We've got three other members of the team who we've been working together with for more than ten years.

0:32
We know each other's strength and weaknesses. We've been through investment cycles together. We've got a tried and tested philosophy and process.

0:39
The whole thing enables really good communication in the team. And that good communication is really crucial for investment success, in our view.

0:47
How would you explain the philosophy and the process of the team?

0:50
Well, I would say a lot of that has to do with the consistency of our performance over time. And that, in turn, is related to our investment process, which aside from the team culture is the--is the foundation of what we do.

1:04
And central to that is our focus on valuation and valuation discipline.

1:09
In practice, that means that we are quite strict in our criteria for, for -- for new stocks entering the portfolio. So we talk about a minimum potential 10% return. So we're looking for quite big gaps between how the market is pricing a stock and you know, what our analysis is, is saying that it's worth.

1:29
In a fairly efficient market, it's not that easy to find these situations. And that's why we, we tend to be quite contrarian in our, in our approach to, to looking for new ideas.

1:39
And that means that often share prices are falling or have fallen and stocks have underperformed before we get interested in a -- in a particular company.

1:49
We think that our investment process can capture quite a diverse range of different kinds of company. The important thing is at that particular point in time is the market underpricing the earnings power of a particular company. And that can be applied to growth or value type businesses.

2:08
And I think that's an important reason why over time our, you know, our performance has been relatively consistent because we're not tied to a specific market environment.

2:19
I think everybody is interested in the same thing ultimately, which is good performance.

2:23
Different fund managers have different ways of generating that performance and some focus on the sort of top down storylines, and some focus on the valuations and the discrepancy between the price and the, the real value of the stock.

2:36
And we're in the latter camp. It doesn't mean to say we, we -- we sort of refute the success of other people who do different things, but we definitely do it this way.

Asian & Emerging Markets equity

Join William Lam and Ian Hargreaves as they discuss the Asian & Emerging Markets equity team’s expertise, investment philosophy, and the significance of team culture.