What if the biggest problem with “Emerging Markets” is the name?

Edward Lam thinks that label has been doing the category a disservice for decades.

Today, he’s sitting down with Stacy to zoom out and question the category…then zoom back in to what that means for portfolios, risk, and real alpha.

Edward grew up in Hong Kong, went to boarding school in the UK, and landed in EM in 2004.

He had no training program or mentor, just four walls of books he was determined to read. By the time he left, he’d taught himself accounting, built a research function from scratch, and was running a fund that grew from £1M to £3.5B.

Listen in to hear:

How Edward built his own training program from scratch and why that became one of his biggest edges
What "subordinate currency regimes" means and how it changes everything we thought we knew about EM risk
The tension between building something investable and staying true to the thesis
What scaling from £1M to £3.5B actually looks like when you have to earn every rung yourself
Why he walked away from asset management, what the gap taught him, and what brought him back

More About Edward Lam:

Edward Lam entered the fund management industry in 2004 as an analyst at Emerging Markets specialist Lloyd George Management, covering Taiwan and technology. In 2007, he co-founded Somerset Capital Management, where he served as Head of Research and chaired the investment committee. In 2010, he launched Somerset’s EM Dividend Growth strategy, scaling it from a ~$1.5M seed to nearly $4B AUM. Edward left Somerset in 2020, then joined Sloane Robinson in 2023, became CIO, and launched the SR Ocellus fund in 2024.

In his free time, he enjoys reading about the history and philosophy of finance, including many areas that others (based on feedback) find boring.

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