New to me anyway; publicly traded airports.I have spent the last few days trying to learn a little about some of the publicly traded airports (many airports from foreign countries are publicly traded companies).
There are close to 20 of them, that I know of anyway. To be clear I have just started looking at them so I still have plenty to learn but I think I might be noticing something with a few of them; they seem to have a low correlation to benchmark index of the respective country of origin.
This is true of the Paris airport versus iShares France (EWQ), sort of true with Singapore airport (pictured above) and iShares Singapore (EWS), Japan airport and iShares Japan EWJ, Vienna airport and iShares Austria (EWO) to name a few.
So what does this mean? Well that remains to be seen I suppose but where I think this is heading is tapping in to what is happening on the ground in a country without correlating to the stock market of that country which at times could be the right position. This might tie into the idea I have had about indexing GDP growth from some countries into an ETF or ETN and using that as a proxy for a country or region.
As I say I am still early on in the learning process but I think there might be something here. Airports are part of the infrastructure theme and the initial impression is that the businesses are not that complex compared to other segments. For now the only thing out there that comes close to an investment product is the Macquarie Airports (MQRSF) which as I understand it owns stakes in quite a few airports around the world.
This is either what I think (hope?) it will be or it isn't but doing the work to learn and then come to a conclusion, whether it is right or not, is an example of what I have been talking about for a while which is coming to grips that equity returns in the future may not come from the areas we expect and so we need to learn about different areas.
4 comments:
Although I have yet no investments there, I see BWX, FAX, EDD & FDD, have all not done well over the last 6 months but HYG has fared better. With the dollar poised to go up, how do you see these doing?
Willy
OT There is an interview with Howard Davidowitz on the marketwatch.com web site. He says the only reason retail sales were up ex autos was due to a calendar shift that added a day to the month (3% increase)
Do you know if this is accurate? I do not know if it is true but it seems like more than a minor detail to me.
i would think the NAVs would do just fine but the market price of the CEFs, you never know.
as far as retail sales, i don't know if it is accurate but calendar distortions happen all the time.
I'm a fan of the airport theme in emerging economies, where growing incomes and limited transportation infrastructures are driving increased passenger traffic at smaller, regional, airports. I am trying to avoid areas that are heavily dependent on tourist traffic, as it is my belief that discretionary spending in the developed economies will be under pressure for some time.
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