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Talk Your Book: International Stocks, So Hot Right Now

2025/4/7
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Rahul Sharma: 我认为国际股票的重新受到关注,主要源于两方面因素:首先是科技巨头(MAG-7)股价的调整,这使得投资者开始寻找新的投资方向;其次,也是更重要的原因,是国际市场出现了多个重大的催化剂,这些催化剂的出现之多、影响之大,都是前所未有的。 特朗普的政策迫使许多国家采取了他们本应很久以前就应该采取的措施,欧洲是最好的例子。这只是个开始,我们可以深入探讨具体的催化剂。 长期以来,人们一直认为新兴市场和国际股票的估值低于美国股票,但估值本身并非催化剂。德国增加国防开支就是一个例子,这出乎所有人的意料。 欧洲各国增加国防和基础设施支出,以及金融领域的整合,都对国际股票市场有利。欧洲金融业的整合对行业结构的改善有益。俄乌战争结束后的重建活动和信贷增长将利好欧洲股票市场,特别是波兰等国家。 从逆向投资的角度来看,即使在小幅上涨之后,国际股票仍然不受青睐。MSCI全球指数中非美国股票的权重仅为30%,远低于45%的长期平均水平。这表明存在均值回归的潜力。 我们管理着全球高股息、国际高股息和新兴市场高股息投资组合。欧洲银行的去杠杆化、高股息和回购等因素使其成为投资目标。中国互联网公司估值较低,且受益于人工智能技术发展,是投资机会。中国政府对互联网公司的支持是其估值提升的重要因素。 我们的投资决策既考虑自下而上的公司分析,也考虑自上而下的国家因素分析。我们进行大量的国家研究,这有助于我们了解国家的优势,以及哪些类型的公司可能在这些国家取得成功。更重要的是,它帮助我们限制对那些看起来便宜但存在其他问题的国家的敞口,例如战争风险、制裁风险以及外部状况较弱的国家。 国际股票的高股息率是估值较低和文化因素共同作用的结果。美元走弱将成为国际股票的利好因素,历史数据也支持这一观点。多种因素可能导致美元走弱,包括美元的长期强势、各国寻求美元以外的交易货币以及特朗普的政策。 即使特朗普改变政策,国际股票的涨势也不太可能迅速消退,因为欧洲的促增长政策以及其他因素仍在发挥作用。投资高股息股票是一种低风险的投资策略,即使在市场下跌时也能获得较好的回报。新兴市场的高股息股票为投资者提供了参与人工智能供应链的机会。欧洲和日本的跨国公司估值较低,且股息率较高,具有投资价值。 投资者将国际股票一概而论,导致一些优质公司被低估。我们通过单独管理账户和共同基金向投资者提供投资产品。主动型共同基金在应对市场波动方面优于被动型ETF。我们的投资组合相对集中,这与我们的投资策略有关。新兴市场和发达市场的国际股票投资机会众多。国际股票的投资资金流入量正在增加。国际股票的投资时机尚未结束,因为其估值仍然处于历史低位。美元贬值将放大国际股票的股息增长。对冲货币风险成本高且难以预测。通过投资国际跨国公司可以获得更低成本的美国股票敞口。

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Today's Animal Spirits Talk Your Book is brought to you by Schaefer Cullen Capital Management. Go to cullenfunds.com to learn more about their global high dividend strategy, international high dividend strategy, and emerging markets high dividend strategy. That's cullenfunds.com to learn more.

Welcome to Animal Spirits, a show about markets, life, and investing. Join Michael Batnick and Ben Carlson as they talk about what they're reading, writing, and watching. All opinions expressed by Michael and Ben are solely their own opinion and do not reflect the opinion of Ritholtz Wealth Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for any investment decisions. Clients of Ritholtz Wealth Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

Welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben. Michael, good timing here. Thank you. International stocks are so hot right now. People are trying to figure out, is this real? Does this actually have legs or is this just another head fake? I'm not going to answer that question, but I'm just going to say, Ben, we're old. That was rhetorical. No, okay. Well, we're still using references from the aughts, the early aughts. And I'm going to give the full story on Animal Spirits, but those references, they don't play anymore.

How about this? That's because the 2020s doesn't have very quotable movies.

That's because it's 20 years ago and people don't remember things from 20 years ago. Like US underperformance. That's true. We spoke about this on the show with Raul, but we're talking about international stocks today. And investors, a lot of investors have literally never seen a period of US lagging for more than, I don't know, two weeks. Yes, there hasn't been a sustained period of outperformance. And there hasn't really been a reason for it.

in this past cycle. And now people are coming around to the idea that maybe there is a reason now. And it seems to come very fast and the markets moved fast as well. But we get into all that. Great conversation. Raul Sharma, who is a portfolio manager and executive director at Schaefer Cullen Capital Management. He has been managing strategies for emerging markets, international stocks for well over two decades. Great conversation. Here's our talk with Raul.

Raul, welcome back. Great. Thanks for having me, guys. So it's been a long period of underperformance for anything benchmarked, not that international stocks are benchmarked to the US, but in the eyes of clients, they are. It's been a long, painful period of underperformance and some of the narrative heading to the end of the year and really for the last couple of years was

What in the world could change the current trajectory, the current narrative of US dominance, particularly the mega cap tax? What could possibly change? And I know you're not necessarily a macro guy. Nobody could have seen this coming. Just

Talk through some of the dynamics that are in place that led to a reawakening of investors' appetite for stocks domiciled outside the United States. Well, I think it's a couple of things. I mean, you know, I think first of all, the correction in the MAG-7 that we saw

At the beginning of the year, I think that was kind of the start of it because just everybody owns these stocks. And it's not just U.S. investors. When we talk to investors in Japan or South Korea and other places, they're all owning them too. They're not owning their own stocks. And so once those stocks started to finally lose, I think people were really looking for another home. And then probably more importantly, you are seeing some pretty meaningful catalysts, I think, for the – I won't say for the first time, but so many at once and I think bigger than before.

in both emerging markets and international developed markets. And I think the short story is, is that, you know, President Trump's policies are forcing some of these countries to do things that they really, frankly, should have done a long time ago. And I think Europe's definitely the best example of that. And so I think, you know, that's a start. I mean, there's a lot we could talk about within that in terms of specific catalysts, but I think I'll just, you know, pause right there. So one of the things that we've talked about for years is, listen, in

international emerging market stocks are way cheaper than US stocks. But people have been saying that and saying that and saying, well, valuation itself is not a catalyst. And I think this is why it's so hard to predict these things in advance is because even if you try to come into the year saying, I think I know what the catalyst is going to be, no one is talking about this, the fact that Germany is going to spend billions and billions of dollars building up their defense. So

So you, is that the biggest thing right now? Just that a lot of these countries are going to start spending money and go from the austerity mindset to actually, no, we're going to open up the floodgates a little bit. Is that the biggest one for you right now?

That is certainly one of the biggest ones. Yeah. And I think kind of led by Germany, but you are seeing it kind of across Europe. They're talking about defense spending, big increases in defense spending, again, because of a reaction to Trump's policies. Also, an infrastructure fund. I mean, there's a lot of needs for that, certainly in Europe and even in Germany, if you look at like the rail system and that sort of thing.

And so, you know, and they're talking about creating physical unions to do all these sorts of things, things like joint procurement. And, you know, when you start spending a lot on defense, it's just not, you know, defense stocks that benefit, it's

A lot of different kinds of stocks. I mean, industrial stocks, you know, defense is so high tech that there's a lot of demand for technology. So there certainly is the potential for a spillover effect. You know, but there's other things, too. I think very encouragingly we're seeing consolidation in certain European markets, particularly in the financial sector.

I think, again, after watching the U.S. banks do so well, they're just kind of looking at looking at, you know, the competitive landscape and saying we need to be bigger to compete against a J.P. Morgan and we just cannot do it. And so it's encouraging to see actually governments like say in Italy actually promoting consolidation and consolidation is a really good thing.

for industries to consolidate, whether you're the consolidator or you're just in that industry, the industry structure improves. So you're certainly seeing that in Europe and that's also a good thing. Then there's the prospects for the end of the war in Russia that has two impacts. One, you will see the risk premium on European stocks go down. And then there's a lot of reconstruction activity

And a lot of increase in bank lending and that sort of thing that can happen. And so you're seeing, you know, kind of markets like Poland and all of Europe that are kind of well positioned for that if it happens. It's certainly a big if, you know, benefit from that. And it's all just happening at a time when, you know, from a contrarian perspective, even after the little rally, equities, international equities are still so out of favor, you

If you look at the weight of non-US equities in MSCI world, it's only about 30% versus a long-term average of over 45%. And back in the early 90s when Japan boomed, it was well over 65%. So there's a lot of room for mean reversion. But I think these things really do bring the promise of earnings growth, which to your point was what was missing. It was just valuations. Now we have valuations and the potential for that. Yeah.

Yeah, well said. So cheap stocks with a positive catalyst, great things can happen. Talk about – so at Schaefer-Cullen, you manage the global high dividend, the international high dividend, and emerging markets high dividend portfolios. Is any of what's going on making its way into how you think about the individual companies and the way that you construct your portfolios? Yeah, definitely. I mean, for the first time in a long time, starting earlier last year, we started getting involved in European banks.

Those banks had also done a very good job of deleveraging. They started then having these excess capital positions, paying huge dividends with great dividend growth and also doing buybacks. Those are all things we like across all strategies. Even our emerging market strategy, you've seen exposure to say Eastern European banks in places like Greece and Poland,

go up for the very same reason. We manage with a dividend mandate in emerging markets. We do have a little bit of flexibility with somewhat lower yielders. So the other big thing that's happening is definitely, I think, in China with the internet companies. So we own two of those companies that are still quite cheap. And we could talk about the implications of DeepSeek, which I think has been a bit of another game changer year to date.

That's interesting because that was one of the big things is just that, listen, the U.S. is just dominating technology-wise and a lot of these other countries can't keep up. And China seems to be like the one place where, I don't know, I guess they've copied a lot of what we did here first and kind of are just doing it themselves. But those companies got dinged pretty bad for a couple of years there. So you think that the AI leveling of the world is going to benefit China potentially? What's the story there?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's just, you know, the way I think about it, you know, first of all, DeepSeek was a very impressive, you know, model, definitely. And it's hard to say how much lower cost it was, but I think it surely was a lower cost than we've seen other internet companies like Alibaba come up with their own large language learning model that is also even more impressive, arguably. Yeah.

And yeah, when you look at these companies, I mean, the way I see it, if you look at the 10 or 15 companies, they're going to kind of enable AI, particularly by offering, you know, things like ChatGPT and Gemini and these models, you know, probably about five of them or a third of them or whatever are going to be Chinese companies. And then when you look at the valuations, they're some 50% cheaper than, you know, their equivalents in the US with maybe not the same capabilities, but close to them. And then the other game changer was that we saw

you know, Xi Jinping kind of get behind the internet companies for the first time. There is a meeting with all the leading companies, including, you know, Alibaba, which had kind of fall foul of the Chinese government. And, you know, he's kind of looking to them to kind of lead the way that's a huge change in what we saw say five years ago, because that was the thing that really brought those internet companies down the greater regulation coming out of the Chinese government. So, um, I think all those things are definitely a game changer and, uh,

It just shows. And, you know, whether people like it or not, with all the tensions and that, I mean, Sina does have very leading technology. I mean, some of the older technologies, like, say, semiconductors, they might still be behind. But when you look at new technologies like electric vehicles or AI or electronics,

renewables. They're quite, quite advanced. And there's a lot of different stats that you could point to that show that. So they're going to be around from a technology standpoint. And those technology companies trading so cheap should really be beneficiaries, I would say. Do you look at

things top down from a country perspective and think that anything that's happened in the last six months or so changes how you view which countries to over underweight or is it more just a bottom-up company thing that you look for the companies first in whatever country they're in doesn't really matter as much

We do it both, but we try to separate it, you know, because when I first started doing this about 25 years ago, we were hoping we'd get a very similar experience than what we get in the U.S., but we learned quickly that country factors really do matter. So we had to kind of come up with this framework to analyze countries and countries.

So we do a lot of country research. So we're looking at stocks from a bottoms up perspective, but we analyze the countries too. It helps us learn a lot about the strengths of countries and which types of companies might be successful in those countries. But probably most importantly, it helps us limit exposures to countries that might look cheap, but have a lot of other problems, whether it be the risk of war, the risk of sanctions.

countries that have really weak external positions that have constantly declining currencies. So that's what we use the country research for, but we find it to be very important. Recently, international stocks have had higher yields than US stocks. Is that because prices are depressed or is that just a structural phenomenon that they tend to pay out more of their earnings and dividends? Yeah, I think it's a bit of both. I would say they certainly were cheaper.

you know, even over the last couple of years, especially the companies focused on their dividends have been raising their dividends.

at pretty nice clips. So that supported higher yields. But then, yeah, I would say in the majority of countries outside of the US, the culture for dividends is kind of greater. They've been paying out more for some time than we are, of course, dominated by the MAG-7 and the US tech stocks, which don't really feel the need to pay dividends because they think they have such great growth opportunities. So I think it's all those factors that make yields approximately 50% higher outside of the US.

than in the US. And that's also in emerging markets, by the way. I want to get more into your process in a minute, but I just wanted to ask about one more catalyst. Do you think all of these new policies are going to make for a weaker dollar as well? Because that's been another headwind for international stocks from the perspective of a US investor that the dollar has been so strong in recent years that that's been just another headwind there. Is that going to become a tailwind potentially if there's less foreign capital flowing into the United States?

Yeah. That's always been the single best thing for non-US equities. I think the stats are that if you look at the 10 periods when the dollar declined, uh, over the last say 30 years or something, um, IFA, MSCI IFA, which is developed market stocks outperformed by about 25% with a 90% hit rate almost all the time. And EMF almost went up even more. It was over 40% with an 80% hit rate. So a declining dollar is the best thing for those stocks. And I do think, um,

There's a very good chance of that happening on the back of several factors. One is just kind of the technical position of the dollar and how well it's done over the last many years. It's kind of where it was back in 2001. It peaked back then and then went down for the next decade, which was a boon for non-US equities. We have a lot of countries that are interested in transacting and things other than the dollars to buy basic commodities like oil or food products.

you know, that's something that could also put a bit of pressure, uh, you know, on the U S dollar. Um, you know, I think the fact that you see gold doing so well as a direct indication of the fact that people are trying to diversify away from the dollar, but then probably the biggest thing is just, I think the, you know, Trump's policies, I think that he, you know, really does want to see the dollar go down and you might not talk about it so much, but, um, certainly, and there's, there's members of his administration that are even more outspoken about it, but, you know, if you want to make America great again and build manufacturing and attract manufacturing and, uh,

investment into the US and you're going to be employing tariffs to weaken the dollars, in my opinion, the single best policy tool to do that. So and, you know, pretty consistently throughout his career, he's he said that that he thought that was a good thing. So that's another reason I think that the dollar could go down. You know, I'm not going to say it's going to collapse or or anything like that, but

You could see weakness. And then a final factor was if the MAG-7 were by chance to continue to correct, that's a lot of dollars coming out of the U.S. That alone could be the biggest kind of near-term factor if it were to occur.

If he were to change his mind overnight, and there's no indications that he's going to, but who knows, do you think that the rally in international stocks would fizzle out? Or is there something bigger at play here? I don't think it would fizzle out. I think you would have to see kind of more of a turn back in some of those pro-growth policies you're seeing in Europe or maybe kind of the war escalate or something like that. Yeah.

You know, I think, you know, what we've seen happen has been very good for non-U.S. equities. Again, his policies are promoting these countries to finally change. It's kind of unbelievable that they've taken so long to do so. And I can't imagine such an, you know, about face, you know, and then it varies by country. You know, he came out kind of really attacking Canada and Mexico. We would say that Mexico is doing a lot better than Canada and reacting to that and

So we think they're in a bit better shape than, say, the Canadian market. So it differs by market as well. So for the past, I don't know, five to seven years, but it felt like really last year, it felt like kind of a crescendo for not only people being against international stocks. I made the comment that in my career, I've never seen such poor sentiment against international stocks where people are just throwing their hands up and saying, I give up. I'm going to be all U.S.,

But it was also the value investing in the dividends. Like, why am I buying these low fundamental or low valuation stocks or these high dividend stocks when growth is all that matters? So maybe you could just give us a whole background of why you're looking for these certain stocks that for a lot of people were out of favor for some time.

Well, I think, you know, because we have great growth, too. You know, we demand earnings growth from our companies, too. Our only thing is that we're not willing to really pay up for it. And we think that, you know, investing in dividend paying stocks is kind of a lower risk approach. You do usually do better in down markets. So for our investors, they like kind of a lower risk approach.

But you'd be surprised, I'd say probably even more so in emerging markets with the opportunity set that you could get within these dividend stocks. So we kind of have less exposure now because they got a bit more expensive. But certainly, I mean, emerging markets is a great place to play the AI supply chain, arguably better than in the US because the AI supply chain is not going anywhere without places like Taiwan or even South Korea. And you'd be surprised how many of those stocks were of

quite, quite cheap. And they're actually getting cheap again, but after correcting in the last couple of months, paying really nice dividends. And so, you know, that's a theme that we've always liked to invest in kind of playing these big mega tech, tech trends through the supply chain to talk about Europe and other places. We think the multinationals are quite interested. We're quite loaded up in them in our international portfolio. Because if you compare some of these global multinationals from say Europe or Japan to U.S. peers, you're

You'll see the businesses are kind of similar in terms of where their revenues and assets are located. But then you just look at the valuation. So, you know, I'd say about 60% of our portfolio, if you compare it to U.S. peers, it's about 25% cheaper with literally double the yield. And, you know, when you look at companies like Siemens or Munich Re, which is the largest reinsurer in the world, you know, I'm not sure you could say that they're really inferior to the U.S. companies. I mean, I think you can for a lot of other companies. But so we think that's a great opportunity in itself, too.

So one of my favorite analogies that investors often use is they're throwing the baby out of the bathwater. So is that you think what happened in a lot of cases here where you could find these much cheaper companies because people were just putting all international emerging market stocks in the same bucket and saying, get me out of here?

Absolutely. Absolutely. You're absolutely correct in that. And I think passive is the big driver of that because people just sell the ETF and maybe a third of the ETF is actually attractive in terms of the fundamentals of the companies, but they're selling those too when you sell your ETF. So I think that that's definitely been a phenomenon that's happened and one that creates a lot of opportunities. Talk to us about how people are accessing your products. Are these separately managed accounts only or what does that look like exactly?

Yeah, we manage separately managed accounts and mutual funds. So the exposure is generally the same because in separately managed accounts, if it's US-based, they're almost always –

custodying in US dollars. So whether it's an ADR or a local security, you're getting the same exposure. I mean, the way I like to think about it, whether you're buying a local share denominated in US dollars or ADR, you're basically buying two things. You're buying a foreign currency and you're buying the local stock. And so if the local stock goes up 1% and the currency goes up 1%, you're going to be up 2% of your position. If each goes up, if the currency goes down one and the stock goes up one, you're flat

But whether it's an ADR or a local, it's the same. And most of our clients through the SMAs are with the big major banks. We have several different relationships. And then we have the funds, I think. An additional thing is in emerging markets, I think mutual funds make a heck of a lot of sense because...

of the access capabilities. It's very, very hard and much more costly. And also you have to give up a lot of your kind of personal information that you might not want to, to access all the emerging market countries in a separately managed account. If you want to get into India locally or into the Asia market in China, or even locally into places like Taiwan or South Korea, not so easy. So I think the funds are a really good vehicle in emerging markets. People are kind of down on mutual funds these days, but I think EM is definitely an exception.

Early in my career, I had to actually do this for separately managed accounts for the endowment fund I worked for, for our separately managed emerging markets account. We were sending off letters and getting stuff stamped and notarized. And you're right, it's to get access to some of these countries is really difficult if you want to own these single stocks, correct?

Correct. Yeah, it's very time consuming. So that's the beauty of the fund. You know, we could just do that on the behalf of investors. And, you know, John Doe doesn't have to give up his personal information. We're coming in as Cullinan Funds Trust on behalf of our investors. Another advantage is that we could reclaim withholding taxes on the dividends for all the investors. That's a much more time consuming process in a supply managed account where the individual needs to go to his tax account.

and have that done. I know this is pretty in the weeds, but I'm assuming that we've got a lot of advisors listening. Why, why the mutual fund and not the ETF? What are the differences? Like, why can't you do that in that wrapper? You,

I guess maybe if it's an active ETF, it would be kind of similar, but certainly we think the passive ETFs, they bring another layer of problems, particularly in emerging markets or even in developed markets. I just think that there's a lot of ETFs that perform pretty well, but I always think they're vulnerable in certain environments. And you never know when those environments come. So COVID was a great example when COVID ended up, we ended up having the most dividend cuts that we've ever seen in history.

And so we were able to actively navigate through that environment by getting into companies in an extremely uncertain time that we thought had more secure dividends, whereas the passive approaches that were waiting to rebalance could not do that, or even the index funds could not do that.

the dividend streams of those funds went down a lot more than ours did. And then similarly later in the year when COVID, you know, when it was seen that it really didn't have the negative economic impact that people thought, there was a huge increase in dividends and people started paying dividends in 2011.

21 that they didn't pay in the COVID year. And so we were able to reposition into that and then benefit from the best year for dividend growth that we've ever seen in our history. Another example in emerging markets would be the ability to de-risk. So we were able to de-risk our exposure pretty successfully and get at

more or less completely out of Russia. Whereas the ETFs, again, they have to wait to rebalance and they're stuck holding those positions. And they took heavy losses for that. That's why I personally think active makes a lot of sense. And the other thing is if you're focused on dividend yield and dividend growth like we are, it's very hard to do that just quantitatively. And if you just look for the increases, you tend to get a lower yield. If you look for the highest yield, you get a lot of companies with very poor corporate governance. So you really need a balanced approach. You really need experience. And I think that's what our team brings to the table.

Looks like you have a relatively concentrated portfolio too. I think in your EM strategy, it says 50 to 70 names. Your international one is more like 35 to 45. What does your opportunity say here? How many stocks are you starting with that you're paying attention to and then whittling down to those numbers?

So if you look at our initial screen, which is kind of a value screen, low P, above average dividend yield, and then getting rid of companies that we think have negative dividend and earnings growth because we've looked at them in the past. These days in emerging markets, we're getting about 850 stocks that meet the screening parameters. And I'd say in international developed markets, we're getting about 600 stocks or so.

You know, so combined non-U.S., that's like six times the amount you get in the U.S. So it's a very large opportunity set. But seeing that we've been doing this since 2000 and the universe doesn't change so dramatically from year to year, we feel like we know it quite well. And, you know, it might just be 10 or 15 percent of the universe that we're unfamiliar with and need to get up to speed with and really get in the weeds with. But the other ones we've kind of looked at before.

We're seeing some serious flows into international stocks. I assume that you all are seeing the same. Yeah, we've been getting good flows, definitely. You know, probably even more so on the emerging market side. But yeah, we're seeing, especially in the SMA side, good flows into the accounts. It's just everyone is so under position. I mentioned, you know, the weight of the index. And, you know, and it happens so quickly, too. I mean, and it's not just happening kind of quickly this time, but

Whatever in the past, I mean, usually, you know, if international say in the 2000s outperformed for the whole decade when international stocks were up and US stocks on average were down, you know, probably about 80% of that move came in the first year or so. And then they still kept outperforming, but it wasn't by quite the magnitude. And if it's not just international versus US, the same thing goes for value versus growth where the reversion happens quite quickly. So for somebody who's listening, who says, I just...

I missed it. I missed it. What would you say to that person? Oh, you haven't missed it at all. I mean, we're still, you know, we could, you know, our marketing team could provide a lot of long-term charts that shows either value versus growth or international versus the U.S. We're so far below, you know, the median average or just the average. You know, I mentioned international stocks being about 50% less in weight than they were on average. Value versus growth still being over one standard deviations.

you know, below the market. And this just being a couple months into, you know, what had been, if it is outperformance for international, what had been by far the largest period of outperformance of non-U.S. stocks versus U.S. stocks, more than a decade. We look at charts of this all the time, and we've looked at these cycles of over and under performance. And in the past, it might have been three, five, seven years potentially. And this one lasted for, I don't know, 12 to 15 years, depending on when you count it.

But it's interesting, if you look at the cycles of outperformance and underperformance between emerging markets in the US, they tend to be even more drastic, where the magnitude of outperformance by the one who's leading is far different. So people forget that the US had the lost decade in the first decade of the century, and emerging markets did great. And it was a huge spread. And now it's kind of worked its way back, and we had mean reversion.

Is that just a currency story? Why are those cycles so much more extreme than they are even between the developed nations? I think it depends, you know, kind of on which cycle we're talking about. I mean,

Back in the 90s, it was because the Asian financial crisis imploded and then we had the Russian crisis. And that just was very bad for emerging markets because all those countries were emerging countries. And then, by the way, it also coincided with the tech boom that ended in 2001. In the 2000s, you got into a better environment for emerging markets, which was...

because commodities, one reason was because commodities were doing a lot better. And that's certainly another thing that could happen and really benefit emerging markets. They always do well when commodity prices do well. So I think that was a big reason. You saw China really growing at its fastest clip. Countries like Brazil were doing very, very well. So

But a constant theme is the dollar, definitely. So, you know, I would be shocked if the dollar went down and international and emerging market stocks didn't outperform. And by the way, the dividend strategies are a great way to get that dollar diversification too, because, you know, if your current, let's say your company raises its dividend organically by 5%, but then the dollar depreciates 5% versus that currency, then your dividend growth is 10%, you know?

And it's also a great way to get diversification because when the dollar goes down, international products like – think about those trips to Italy or that chocolate from Switzerland or those cars from Germany. They all get more expensive. So having some sort of diversification to allow you to keep your purchasing power I think is a sensible thing for investors to do. On the flip side, what would you say to somebody who says, no, I want to own international stocks, but I don't – I just –

I don't want any dollar exposure. I just want to own them as if I was a resident. I want to own Italian stocks as if I was an Italian. I don't want any currency fluctuations. What would you say to that person? Then they're going to have to hedge their currencies, which is costly and is going to, at least from our perspective, eat into some of the income. And timing currencies is pretty –

is pretty difficult. Again, in a separately managed account, it's very difficult in the U.S. to get that kind of exposure. You know, banks just don't know what they just have to do. It just gets...

a lot more costly for banks. And especially with rates going up, the cost of hedging has gone up too. But I think you want that, especially where we're at now. I think you want that foreign currency exposure for the reasons I just described. You're saying get the double whammy. If international stocks are going to outperform, it's likely that you're going to get, who knows, but it's likely that you're going to get even more appreciation from a falling dollar.

Yeah, I mean, you know, hey, you know, be overweight the US and the US dollar if you want, but yeah, get some diversification with international stocks and get some diversification away from the dollar with international currencies. I think that makes a lot of sense to me.

One of the things that we've heard from a lot of people pushing back in recent years is saying, I'm putting all my money into U.S. stocks. I don't need international stocks. It's just that if you look at the S&P, something like 35% to 40% of all revenue comes from overseas. And people say, see, I'm already diversified overseas. So what do you say to investors who have that mindset?

Well, first of all, you're just paying a lot more for that international exposure because the valuations are some 40% higher. But you can make the counter argument. Why don't you get cheaper US exposure by investing in international multinationals? Because if you were like, I think the CAC 40, they get about 40% of their revenues in

I want to say from the US or certainly outside of the US, but we have companies like Deutsche Telle, which owns T-Mobile, which they're just cleaning up on AT&T and Verizon. That's a good example. We have Cervic Insurance, which owns Farmers Insurance. Companies like Toyota obviously have huge businesses here in the US. So you could get a lot cheaper US exposure through really good international multinationals that trade at such more compelling valuations.

Good answer. Thanks. I like that one. Strong to quite strong. All right, Raul, very interesting. For people that want to learn more about how to take advantage of hopefully the early innings of a shift towards friendly or international stocks, where do we send them? I would suggest our website. We have a very equipped marketing team. We have regional marketers that could get in touch with you. Feel free to call the office. So those are all great ways to learn more about our products. Hit us with a website. What is it?

It's www.schafer-cullen.com. Hey, thanks to Raul. Remember to check out cullenfunds.com. That's C-U-L-L-E-N. Email us, animalspirits at compoundnews.com.