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INVESTORS IN SOUTH-EAST ASIAN EQUITIES.

There is nothing like sitting on a fat, unreal­ised profit to make an investor nervous, and a fat paper profit is precisely what you should have if you put your money into south-east Asian equities at the start of the year and kept it there.

The phenomenon of soaring stock prices has not been con­fined to the big­gest markets in the region. Trading volumes have swol­len too.

Investors, who are understandably considering selling their south-east Asian shares to realise profits, are faced with a familiar dilemma: they cannot think of anything they would rather buy, but they fear a regional stock-market crash or at least a sharp cor­rection in the weeks ahead.

Indeed, this week has seen reverses in many of the region’s markets as investors have decided to book some of the profits rollowing the recent strong advances.

Most of the stockbrokers analysing such risks start by looking at the reasons for this extraordinarily robust performance by south-east Asian equities. Some of them are obvious. Except in the Phi­lippines, the region’s econo­mies have shrugged off reces­sions in the Japanese, US and European markets and are typ­ically growing by 8 per cent a year.

Some of the causes are peculiar to particular markets. In Malaysia, stock market activity has been fuelled by political manoeu­vring and the distribution of financial favours. In Singapore, the government has launched a campaign to promote share ownership.

Such special factors, how­ever, are only part of the story. Stock market analysts agree that south-east Asian markets, like equity markets elsewhere, are “liquidity-driven”. In other words they are beneficiaries of the worldwide fall in interest rates which has tempted large sums of money out of bank deposits and into equities.

Previous rallies in south-east Asia have often been prompted by local speculators driving up the price of secondary stocks, with foreign investors tagging along behind saying: “We know this company is funda­mentally unsound, but we’re going to buy it anyway because we know local shareramping will increase the value of the shares.”

This time, the situation is different. Foreign investors, particularly US mutual funds increasing their exposure to the economies of south-east Asia, have led the charge, buy­ing blue chip shares.

The new money makes a pro­found impact. Although the capitalisation of south-east Asian markets is growing fast - and some of them can now absorb the $ lm plus buy orders demanded by big international investors - their small size means that a rush of foreign buying can have a disproportionate effect on share prices and market indices.

Stock market analysts say the principal risk of a sharp fall in the value of south-east Asian stocks will come from abroad. If world interest rates rise, foreign money may try to get out of Asian stocks as quickly as it is now trying to get in; just as demand for relatively illiquid stocks forces prices to rise exceptionally sharply, so selling pressure forces prices sharply down.

A further problem in south-east Asia, with the notable exception of Singapore, is that several markets are poorly regulated. Foreign investors are partly shielded from this by the preponderance of blue chips in their portfolios, and both Thailand and Malaysia have recently established securities commissions in an attempt to improve company disclosure and control insider dealing.

No-one would be surprised if a sharp fall in regional equity values revealed a few companies with difficulties that they were able to hide in a bull market.

Price/earnings ratios are not excessive on south-east Asia markets in comparison with the industrialised world and price levels can be justified by strong corporate earnings growth.

Any fall in Asian stock markets prompted by an outflow of foreign funds is likely to be limited by the fact that Asians are becoming increasingly wealthy and active in thier own markets. Even during the recent surge of foreign buying, foreign investors in the Thai market were accounting for only about a fifth of turnover.

Only a rash investor, however, would rule out the possibility of a sustained sharp downward correction in equity values across the region after such a bull market.

 Indeed, the recent Asia’s financial crisis has swept up some of the world’s best managed companies. So no one would fault you if you steered clear of Asia until the ruckus dies down.

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