Episode 204: Christine Reed of Ninety One: Emerging Market Debt, Learning to Take Risk on the Frontier

Christine Reed is an analyst on the Fixed Income team at Ninety One covering Latin American sovereign and currency markets. Based in New York, Christine is responsible for all Latin America coverage and supports the alpha decision-making process across investment capabilities. She previously worked at Goldman Sachs Asset and Citigroup. Our conversation starts with Christine's first foray into finance and how she found herself fitting on a trading floor. We then trace her path into emerging markets and some initial early lessons on having to take risk, and "own" that risk. We then do a deep dive into emerging markets and work around the region analyzing central bank policy, the strength of institutions, the reaction to inflation and the road ahead. We spend a dedicated section discussing ESG integration and some of the leapfrogging that is occurring in developing countries. We look at past systemic crises in certain EM regions and ask why this has been avoided in the most recent crisis post-Covid. When it comes to portfolio construction in an Emerging Market Debt portfolio we look at the interplay of quantitative and qualitative inputs and how divergent some of the components of an index can be. Finally in this section we examine recent geopolitical risk and concerns and investors' reaction to them. Christine's perspective on diversity in the industry is informed by her time spent in emerging markets where different support systems and social structures exist supporting working parents. We look at the importance of these support systems in enabling leaders to thrive and ask how far away we are from this equilibrium in our current industry state. This podcast is brought to you with the kind support of Tom Raber and Alvine Capital, a specialist investment advisor and fund placement boutique with offices in London and Stockholm. An early adopter of the "reverse enquiry" form of placement, Alvine relies on insight and dialogue with its pan-European investor base to develop and source investment solutions from a wide variety of industry providers.