Our Investment Process

At Aberdeen, our portfolio managers do all their research themselves, holding over 100 meetings each year with senior policymakers in over 40 emerging market countries.

Our approach gives us the conviction to make our investment decisions paying little attention to consensus, peer groups or the benchmark.

Comprehensive country research

Research forms the foundation of our investment process. Our research is consistently updated to provide a forward-looking analysis of a country’s credit profile, and developments in its capital markets.

Factors that play a part in analysing a country’s creditworthiness include:

• The country’s macroeconomic profile
• The nature of its political institutions
• The robustness of its microeconomic institutions

Creating the opportunity set

Our analysis of the market structure and market technical factors can point towards opportunities. These may be confirmed or rejected by our fundamental analysis. These two processes create our emerging markets debt opportunity set.

Scenario analysis

We believe historic performance and volatility measures are inappropriate for gauging forward-looking risk and volatility in emerging markets.

Instead, we analyse each type of instrument based on our assessment of forward-looking risks for direct comparison across instrument types among different countries.