Karoll Capital at WOOD's Winter Wonderland EME conference

Karoll Capital's investment team attended the 8th annual WOOD’s Winter Wonderland EME conference in Prague on 3-6 Dec 2019. This is the largest Emerging and Frontier Europe event of the year with over 200 companies and investors participating. Over the span of the week our team met with representatives of more than 50 companies from Poland, Russia, Turkey and other CEE countries. Meetings with managers and executives from some of the largest Polish banks proved to be especially insightful considering the cloud of uncertainty hanging over the sector. We were reassured that the perspectives of our financial picks remain solid, and continue to see a substantial disconnect between fundamentals and market prices. While investors’ sentiment towards Polish stocks, especially large-caps, was rather bearish due the poor market performance in 2019 and the lack of clear catalysts, we believe that most risks are to a large extent already priced in by the market. At the same time, we saw increased interest towards Russian stocks, which are among the best-performers YTD across emerging markets. Valuations of Russian equities still remain compelling, in our view, which is accompanied by superior dividend yields vs. other markets in the CEE region.