Tundra Pakistan Fund celebrated its five year anniversary during the past month. It has undoubtedly been an exciting period since the fund was launched on the 14^th of October 2011: Tundra are since a few years back locally present in Karachi with a research office, the fund had as of end of October returned 238% in SEK terms (during the same period traditional emerging markets returned 50%) and MSCI has announced that Pakistan will be upgraded from frontier market to emerging market status. We are convinced that the next five years will be equally exciting.

Similar to equities globally, October was a tough month for frontier markets. The frontier market SEK return was boosted by the Krona depreciation and ended the month at +4% (MSCI Frontier Markets xGCC Net).

• Quarterly corporate results were in focus at several of the frontier markets. In Vietnam, a majority of the blue chips came out with strong reports while the consumer sector in Nigeria as expected had a challenging quarter.

• In Pakistan, the economic news flow continued to be positive as the country successfully issued USD 1bn of bonds and the currency reserve hence hit an all-time high of USD 24bn. In addition, S&P announced an upgrade of the country’s credit rating. Political turmoil however resulted in the equity market ending the month at +3% (-2% in USD).

• We continue to see possible turbulence in global stock markets as the short-term biggest threat to a positive development for frontier markets.

Click for the full Pakistan or Frontier Opportunities update.