International & value Bullish ▲

Start of a multi-year international-value outperformance vs US growth — UK (EWU), Argentina (ARGT), Brazil (EWZ/PBR). Gundlach (Jun 12): "position for" the rest of the world and emerging markets over the US — US price/book is 5.7 vs 2.4 ex-US, and EM equities + EM local-currency debt have already led for ~1.5–4 years (his strongest call a year ago, still on), powered by a falling dollar; US-vs-RoW relative performance sits ~3–4σ above its 1970-on average and is rolling over. Thomas (Chart Storm, May 31): reiterates bullish EM — strong even ex-Korea/Taiwan and in MSCI-EM local-currency terms (not just a weak-USD story), with the IEMG-vs-VWO gap showing a real SK/TW AI boost. Letko (Jun 4): emerging markets keep offering high-quality industry leaders "on sale" — double-digit earnings growth + fat dividends at low-teens P/Es you'd be "hard-pressed to find in developed markets"; constructive on Brazil (political change + robust GDP while the market has "given up"), and on Mexico through USMCA-renegotiation risk ("a community of interest will prevail" — own the industry leaders that can weather it). Top EM holding: Copel (ELP); also the Mexican exchange monopoly (Bolsa Mexicana). Eisman (Jun 18, counterpoint): avoid European stocks — over-regulated, slow-growing (Germany's GDP "barely grown in years"), and only ~18% tech vs ~38–50% in the US; no European name tops $1T (ASML ~$750B the only tech in its top 5), and Europe is "no hedge" to a US recession since it's heavily US-dependent. (His EM/RoW view is unstated — the caution is specifically Europe.) Polomny (Jun 24): several South American markets are performing, and as the political landscape turns market-friendly the perception shift should pull capital in — "we might be looking at a decade of outperformance in Latin American markets." Polomny (Jul 4): the left→right wave (Milei → Colombia → Brazil’s Oct vote) sets up an equity rerating — Colombia’s new president is purging Ecopetrol’s board — and after ~20 years of US outperformance, cheap LatAm could begin a decade-long rerating (watch EC, GeoPark/GPRK, Parex/PXT). Hay (Jul 13): reiterates and "amps up" the Brazil bull case — Brasil Bolsa Balcão (BOLSY) at trough P/S & P/E and a ~5% yield after a ~25% correction despite robust Q1 earnings, a "massive discount" to global exchange peers (20×+) tied to Brazil's single-digit-P/E market and the highest real interest rates "of any major economy," which he expects to fall "in a big way," triggering "a massive bull market in Brazilian equities"; EWZ (profit-taken earlier this year, −15% from its April apex) framed as a correction within a structural bull market for real assets; risk = a Lula re-election (age 80, dead-heat polls), likely to weigh on shares despite his economic pragmatism. Morrison / Wealhouse (Jul 23, In the Money): wrote at the fall-2024 election that the age of US exceptionalism had peaked — cheap names abound below ~US$50B cap in Canada/US but essentially not above, so Wealhouse allocates abroad. The validation is takeovers: 30+ portfolio companies bid for since 2018, increasingly by international acquirers — three in the interview week alone (Prologis' second bid for SEGRO at a big NAV discount, ABB for Rotork, Samsung Biologics for PolyPeptide). The buyback culture that shrank the US market (Apple retired 40%+ of its shares since 2012, multiple pre-teens → high-30s) is migrating Japan → Korea → UK — "go where the puck is going"; Canada outperforming the US "all the while we've been under attack" shows valuation + repatriated domestic capital beat narrative. Hay (Jul 26): "more likely the great rotation than the great meltdown." With ~45% of US market cap in AI-related names (~70% of the Nasdaq), the analogue is 1998–2000 — most stocks were already two years into a bear market, and value stocks rose through most of the 2000–02 crash that took the S&P down ~50% and the Nasdaq ~80%. Per GMO, value is very cheap and deep value "unbelievably cheap": "it's amazing how many companies… pretty good companies are trading at 10 times earnings or less" — some because they're seen as AI victims (software "absolutely destroyed"). International: "pounding the table for over a year… they outperformed last year, they're outperforming again this year." Closing plea: "don't go to a bomb shelter, but be on alert for all these opportunities" — the risk is souring on miners, energy, financials and overseas all at once and going to cash at the wrong time. Aitken (Jul 28) on Canada specifically: these are the "golden years" but the discount trade is largely done — the gap to the US has closed, the index yield now sits below bond yields, and 15–20% annual returns were delivered by a backdrop that "is not 15 or 20% good." The gap is multiple expansion — "we're borrowing from the future… pulling that forward" — which "portends more difficult returns going forward." He stays fully invested but recycles from the crowded winners (banks, utilities incl. Fortis, which he agrees "isn't cheap anymore") into feared names. Polomny (Aug 1): reiterates the EM position as a duration call, not a trade — EM-over-DM relative-performance shifts "usually have a long wave of 8-10 years. Still lots of meat on the bone in my view," with the relayed supports being stronger fundamentals and cheap valuations, EM tech leaders "becoming key players in the global AI value chain," Korea and China opportunity where "selectivity remains important," and resource-driven markets levered to AI-infrastructure demand plus stronger commodity cycles. On Argentina he now reads reform plus a resource windfall: "Austrian economists would be proud… on track to eliminate inflation within one to two years," the task being "to move from economic triage to real and lasting economic growth," with Vaca Muerta "acting as a big tailwind to Argentina's economic recovery and growth" — record May 2026 output of 887,227 b/d (+19% YoY) and 5.5 Bcf/d gas (+11% YoY), shale a record 70.6% of oil / 69.8% of gas, 1–1.5 Mbpd expected by 2030 on YPF and private-producer spend, Argentina now South America's fourth-largest producer — rhyming with the North Sea under Thatcher, "often ignored when discussing the UK's recovery." 2026-AUG-04 — Rick Rule (Stansberry Investor Hour): Petrobras as the dividend-rule exception — a "rapacious" state majority shareholder forces an outrageous payout, but upstream drill-bit efficiency now grows production and reserves on suboptimal sustaining capex (the pre-2024 capital drought was cannibalizing the company; no longer). Risk: Brasília escalates "the level of theft" — which paradoxically pays minorities too, via the same dividends. 2026-08-17 — a sharp dissent on Europe from Strategas. "Some of our clients have really been hot and heavy on Europe, mainly because it's cheap. And my view is that they're cheap for a reason… they're not dynamic economies. They don't have AI… they basically are just trying to stay in the game. They're not trying to do anything special" — with German GDP that "has basically not grown for the last four five years, not a dollar," and "the richest families in Europe are largely the same richest families in Europe from 400 years ago." Critically, the Euro Stoxx is at a record, but decomposing it removes the diversification argument: autos and luxury (the China-dependent half) are in "prolific bear markets," and the high is carried by "stocks like Schneider Electric — AI buildout… names like Siemens Energy turbines… plus banks" — i.e. the same AI trade in euros. Trennert: "I would rather stay here at home." (Trennert/Verrone on Eisman Ep 73, Aug 17) 2026-AUG-15 — App Economy Insights PRO (LatAm fintech divergence): the same country, opposite credit outcomes. Nu grew credit 37% to $39.4B while cost of credit fell 9% Q/Q, risk-adjusted NIM rebounded to 12.4% from 9.5% and early delinquencies improved — net income past $1B quarterly at a record 33% ROE, with Mexico monetizing at $12.3 ARPAC vs $5.6 for Brazil at the same stage. StoneCo ran the reverse: loan book more than doubled to R$3.75B, but provisions +128% and 90+ day delinquencies 4.7% → 8.6% on "weaker vintages," payments core at +3% revenue, guidance steered to the low end as Brazil's high rates persist. The screen is cost of credit and risk-adjusted margin, never loan-book growth. 2026-AUG-19: Faber: two years of ex-US/value/small outperformance nobody notices — foreign and value up ~30% last year and ~25% this year, “definitely creaming the S&P, but no one really cares if the S&P is still doing 15%.” Ex-US is “much cheaper,” only starting to close a 17-year gap (“still pretty wide alligator mouth”); the country-CAPE screen puts the cheapest 12-15 markets at high-single to low-double-digit CAPEs against the US at 42. Seasonal kicker: the best window of the presidential cycle starts ~October, with January the big small-cap-value month. (Meb Faber, Cambria webinar 2026-AUG-19) 2026-SEP-01: Trader Ferg adopts Meb Faber's shareholder yield as his passive core and his forward benchmark — "little opportunity cost and a fat margin of safety… it has outperformed and is what I plan to benchmark my portfolio against moving forward" — with the spread as the clincher: "EYLD sits on a forward PE of 9x, while SPY is 20x and QQQ is 22.5x. My view is that the above performance gap will continue to widen for years to come." (Ferg's Finds, 2026-SEP-01.) Slegers 2026-SEP-01: a European quality manager narrows the map rather than widening it — the go-forward mandate is now "worldwide (developed countries only)" and 15-20 stocks (from 21), with the sole emerging-market holding (Dino Polska, Poland) marked for reduction. The stated reason is a three-year lesson: "almost every time I made a buy decision because I thought the company was somewhat quality but definitely cheap, it was a mistake in hindsight." The weight shift is toward North American financials and holding companies — Brookfield, S&P Global and Fairfax up; LVMH, Novo Nordisk and Dino Polska down. Greg Abel (CNBC) 2026-SEP-02, speaking from Tokyo on Berkshire's Japanese sogo shosha positions: "various trading houses, we do see nice increases in the underlying returning capital. They're delivering back to shareholders." No individual house is named in the captured portion, and the single variable he volunteers is shareholder return, not earnings or multiple — the capital-return reform remains the thesis. Abel flew out to meet the companies directly and briefed Buffett on "how each of the meetings went and how the companies are performing"; Buffett "absolutely loves the Japanese investments." Pieter Slegers / TJ Terwilliger (Compounding Quality), 2026-MAR-29: the case for rotating out of US-only exposure, made on an arithmetic bound rather than a forecast — since March 2009 "US stocks have compounded at 15% per year" and "have outperformed almost every asset over this period," but "the US outperformance can't go on forever. If it did, US stocks would eventually make up 100% of the global stock market." Rolling five-year returns show leadership alternating between the US and the rest of the world, and the 2025 numbers already point the other way: S&P 500 +18.1% against Emerging Markets +25.9%, Asia +32.7% and Europe +36.4%. With J.P. Morgan's charts used for both the level ("the US market is also quite expensive") and the consequence ("buying the S&P 500 at the current valuation levels will probably yield lower returns"), the expression chosen is the quality factor applied abroad — IQLT (developed ex-US, screened on ROE, earnings variability and debt-to-equity) and its UCITS twin IEQU. Pieter Slegers (Compounding Quality), 2026-APR-12: makes the case for European family-controlled holding companies as the international-value expression, and names the mechanism rather than the sentiment — "To understand Brookfield, you have to understand each one of these businesses. That takes a lot of time and effort. But it also creates opportunities. Investors often ignore these companies, causing them to trade at discounts." i.e. the mispricing is caused by analytical cost, so it is durable and available to anyone willing to do the sum-of-the-parts. Worked example: Brookfield (BN) at $42 against a $68 intrinsic value — a 38% discount, "large from an historical perspective", on 16.6%/yr since 2001. Ten vehicles listed with a controlling family and a long-run CAGR each — Investor AB (Wallenberg, since 1916, 14.3%/yr), Scottish Mortgage (14.4%/yr, and the route to SpaceX/Anthropic/ByteDance), MBB SE (Freimuth 71%, 17.4%/yr), Markel (9.9%/yr), Ackermans & van Haaren (11.4%/yr), Sofina (Boël, since 1898, 8.6%/yr), Exor (Agnelli 50%), Constellation Software (29.9%/yr) and Brederode (Van der Mersch 55%, 8.5%/yr). The honest part is the dispersion the same post prints: four of the ten trail the index over their stated windows, and Exor has compounded at 1.5%/yr since its 2022 listing — so the category is a hunting ground, not an allocation, and no NAV discount or multiple is quoted for any name except Brookfield. 2026-SEP-02 (Hay/Haymaker, "Has the Sun Already Set on American Market Exceptionalism?"): the international call upgraded from preference to evidence. Per Gerard Minack (Minack Advisors, MSCI data), "the U.S. market itself has been lagging overseas indexes since the start of 2025" — MSCI US vs MSCI All Country ex-US total return, relative peak early 2025. Hay flags this as "surprising" given the "mammoth inflows into U.S. equities due to the AI boom/mania" and the "proliferation of trillion-dollar-plus market caps." Positioning closes it: American investors "remain dramatically underweight foreign markets" and "few seem to realize the long-overdue rotation into international equities is well underway," with "a long list of what we believe are attractive overseas stocks" in the coverage universe — none named in the post. 2026-SEP-04 — Fraser Jenkins pushes back on the cheap-international case on evidentiary grounds: "I don't think there's really good evidence that relative valuation has been a particularly useful guide to medium-term relative regional performance for a long time. And I'm not sure why that should start now." Anyone forecasting European outperformance "has to assume that earnings growth is going to outperform US earnings growth. And I just don't see a basis for making that kind of forecast." He is instead strategically overweight US equities on AI-adoption advantage, a flat US working-age population (vs ~−0.5%/yr Europe, ~−1%/yr China), and a still-rising profit share of GDP. 2026-SEP-09 (Peter Grandich) — a harder Europe dissent: "I've told you for over a year, I believe the EU is the beginning of the end of it." Europe has "greatly underperformed much of the rest of the Western world for a few decades" and Germany, once "the economic engine that pulled the world," is "basically dismantled." 2026-SEP-10 Gundlach: MSCI US price/book 5.72 vs 2.49 for the rest of the world; US-vs-ex-US peaked ~2 years ago and trends lower; the S&P has lagged MSCI EM ~20% since end-2024 and should keep falling as the trade-weighted dollar falls. EM local-currency debt should beat US corporates. Near term he is "coming close to home" on the risk setup and September-October seasonals. 2026-SEP-04 (Peter Lukacs): a Hungary-based investor avoiding US stocks entirely since the Hungary–US double-tax treaty lapsed in 2024. The cheapest tobacco names are UK-listed (Imperial ~12% FCF yield, BAT ~10%) vs Altria ~8% and PM ~4%. Japanese stocks look expensive after years of low rates, and rising yields may cheapen them. Deluard (2026-SEP-17): contrarian UK call — UK DB pensions cut UK equities from 50% of assets to 5% ("who's left to sell?"), with an independent central bank and no eurozone exposure; he frames the UK as the correlated hedge for anyone short euro assets. Keeps his healthcare/energy/financials "holy trinity" sleeve, now the top three sectors at once for the first time.