Dr. Mark Mobius, the executive chairman of Templeton Asset Management, one of the top five providers of Exchange Traded Funds said,”The rise in emerging market equity prices has been substantiated by a correspondingly large increase in the earnings growth of emerging market companies. While there may be cases where stock prices have run ahead of fundamentals, our analysis leads us to believe that on average, prices are in the middle of their historical range.” Mobius says food inflation is a big issue that is impacting his investing outlook. “In general the commodities space continues to be attractive to us. Food prices have gone up and are likely to stay up for some time,” he says, citing bad weather, as well as increasing demand from Indian and China. “We may have to live with higher food prices unless farm productivity increases dramatically,” he says. “This is one of the reasons we are looking very closely at investments in Ukraine, a country that is famous for agriculture and its fertile ‘black earth’. Operations there are not limited to wheat, corn and other crops but also extend to dairy and meat production. Meanwhile in Brazil, we are looking at food processing businesses.”

Two weeks ago in our annual predictions we forecast that by year end there will a Ukraine based agricultural ETF or Hedge fund.

UkrAgroConsult