Never miss a story — sign up for PLANSPONSOR newsletters to keep up on the latest retirement plan benefits news.
Emerging Markets Continue Trend of Positive Returns
This comes at no surprise, when looking at the 12-month period ending in July, in which emerging markets had a 53.94% gain, more than double the developed markets gain of 21.52%.
Emerging markets had a strong showing in the second quarter of 2007 as well. Emerging equity markets rose 14.81% during the second quarter of 2007 versus 6.82% for developed equity markets (See Emerging Markets Outperform Domestic Markets in Q207 ).
For the month, 10 of the 25 emerging markets finished in positive territory with Thailand (+14.17%), Turkey (+13.62%) and China (+14.47%) posting significant returns. Negative returns for the emerging markets were modest, with Mexico (-3.44%), the Philippines (-3.33%) and Pakistan (-3.25%) showing the greatest declines.
The top three markets by weight, Japan, U.K. and U.S., were all down, posting losses of 0.26%, 2.20% and 3.41%, respectively.
Only 12 of the 27 developed markets posted positive returns in July. Double-digit gains were posted by South Korea (11.56%) and Slovenia (10.42%), with the rest of the developed markets quickly falling.
In July, 8 of the 10 sectors posted losses, led by Financials with a 4.27% decline. Materials (+1.12%) and Industrials (+0.96%) were the only sectors to post gains. Marine issues, a sub-industry of Industrials, increased 13.94% in July, and is now posting a substantial 12-month return of 103.5%.
To see the full S&P report visit www.standardandpoors.com/indices .