TCW Group, a global asset manager serving institutional and individual investors, is betting that emerging markets will sizzle this year after a hot 2009.
On Monday, TCW Group announced that it launched a new mutual fund, the TCW Emerging Markets Equities Fund. The managers of the fund will be Mark Madden and David Robbins, portfolio managers with 39 years of combined experience investing in emerging markets.
Before joining TCW, Madden was the lead portfolio manager at Ninth Wave Capital Management, focusing on emerging markets, as well as the sole manager of $14 billion in dedicated emerging market assets at OppenheimerFunds.
Robbins is a managing director with TCW Worldwide Opportunities and portfolio manager of its emerging market fixed-income strategy.
"Over the next few years, growth in emerging markets will be substantially higher than in the developed economies, which means that EM companies will deliver greater earnings growth," predicted Madden, who began investing in emerging markets in 1993, according to TCW. "Emerging economies continue to benefit from both globalization and expanding domestic consumption."
Robbins said emerging market economies are also better positioned than developed economies coming out of the credit crisis, with a faster growing middle class and less consumer and corporate debt.
The new fund will invest across the large-, mid- and small-cap emerging market universe.
The TCW Emerging Markets Equities Fund is in addition to TCW's other emerging market fund offerings, including the TCW Emerging Markets Income Fund and an emerging market sovereign- and corporate-debt mutual fund.
TCW has approximately $108 billion of assets under management.
