The Investors First Podcast Perth Tolle, Life & Liberty Indexes: Perth Tolle's EM Freedom Factor
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Nov 6, 2025 In this conversation, Perth Tolle, founder of the Freedom 100 Emerging Markets Index, dives into her unique approach to investing that weights personal and economic freedom. She shares her journey from Beijing to the U.S. and how her experiences fueled her vision for a freedom-focused investment strategy. Perth discusses the importance of excluding authoritarian regimes like China and Russia from her index, the meticulous construction process of the Freedom 100 Index, and the incredible outperformance linked to prioritizing freedom in emerging markets.
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Personal Experience Sparked The Idea
- Perth Tolle recounted living in Beijing and returning to China as a young adult, where a friend's lack of official identity highlighted personal freedom gaps.
- That experience, plus seeing corporate governance issues in China, motivated her to avoid investing in autocracies and build a freedom-focused EM strategy.
Freedom Weighting Prioritizes Returns
- Perth prioritized long-term risk-adjusted returns by weighting countries by a human freedom score instead of market cap.
- She framed freedom weighting as a return-driven, not purely ESG, decision to improve long-term outcomes in EMs.
Use Independent Freedom Data
- Use third-party, transparent data for country freedom scores to avoid subjective bias when building an index.
- Perth sourced the Fraser–Cato human freedom dataset to keep scoring objective and reproducible.
