A reluctant contrarian

Last year, I found myself doing something that would have horrified my much younger, investment analyst self: hosting twenty institutional allocators on household visits in Tier 2 India while our portfolio was lagging badly on a relative basis. Not exactly textbook timing for a roadshow.

But here's the thing about spending fifteen years investing in emerging markets - you learn that the best time to show people what you believe in is precisely when nobody else does.

We spent a week traipsing through Indian homes where monthly incomes hover around USD400-600. Not the 1% of the economy that Silicon Valley gets excited about, nor the 72% living at sub-Saharan Africa income levels that make for challenging headlines. The unglamorous middle 27% that actually represents the future of consumption in India.

I watched a mother in Pune explain her daughter's ambitions with a steeliness that would make any FTSE 100 CEO uncomfortable. "She will work. She will have choices I never had." Not a hope. A statement of fact. Then she showed us the Indigo paint she'd chosen for her daughter's bedroom refresh - a small affordable luxury that our portfolio company had supplied, and that our analysts had modelled, but that only made sense when you saw it in context.

Something curious has been happening in emerging markets for years now. International portfolio flows have been painfully negative across the board, yet when I ask investors what's fundamentally changed, the answers are strong but global in nature. Trade war fears. China uncertainty. Sentiment. It feels less like conviction and more like a convenient narrative.

Never mind that emerging markets represent 85% of the world's population under 30, or that the IMF forecasts EM growth at 4.2% versus 1.8% for developed markets over the next five years. The optimism applied to technology growth doesn't seem to find a home for humans anymore.

My overarching point is that it's one thing to present a DCF model showing why Domino's Pizza will compound at high teens for a decade. It's another to sit in a living room and hear a family excitedly planning their first "proper restaurant outing" to celebrate a daughter's exam results. These aren't abstractions. They're transactions that will happen, regardless of whether other fund managers are brave enough to stay invested. Real experience. Real growth.

The hardest part of this job isn't the analysis. It's maintaining conviction when everyone around you thinks you're wrong. When consensus moves decisively in one direction, the psychological pressure to follow is immense. You question yourself daily. Maybe they know something I don't. Maybe I'm missing something obvious.

But that's precisely when you need to look most closely at what you believe and why. Not to stubbornly cling to a losing position, but to honestly assess whether the fundamentals have changed or just the sentiment. Are the families I visited consuming less, or are investors simply more frightened? Are our businesses executing worse, or are they just unfashionable?

The best opportunities in investing don't announce themselves with fanfare and universal agreement. They emerge quietly in the gap between what's happening and what people think is happening. Usually when everyone else is looking the other way.