Ruchir Sharma to quit Morgan Stanley, explore investments and writing work

After serving 25 years in Morgan Stanley, Ruchir Sharma would leave the investment banker and financial services firm on January 31 next year to venture into investments and focus on writing opportunities.

He is currently the head of emerging markets and chief global strategist at Morgan Stanley.

Sharma has a rich investment experience of 27 years and has close to $20 billion in assets under his direct management. Armed with this strength, he has told his friends that he will now “pursue new investing and writing opportunities.”

His experience includes travelling to several countries to look for investment opportunities, gather data for research and meet different stakeholders. He typically spends one week every month in a different country, meeting with leading politicians and top CEOs,

Based on his travels, Sharma created a pioneering framework for identifying the emerging and developed markets most likely to underperform and outperform in coming years.

His investment approach combines top-down country allocation work with bottom- up stock picking skills.

Most of the assets under Sharma’s management are invested in the public equity markets. The client base is largely institutional including leading pension funds and sovereign wealth funds. The funds he manages include a global emerging markets strategy, regional strategies covering Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe, western Asia, Africa and frontier markets.

His core Global Emerging Markets fund has performed strongly in recent years and beat the MSCI index by 6.9 per cent over the past year.

Some of the more concentrated strategies that he conceived have since gone on to become category leaders include the Emerging Leaders fund and the NextGen emerging markets fund. The global strategies under his management include a global active international fund that invests in developed market equities. Most of these funds have outperformed their respective benchmarks.

For instance, the Emerging Market Leaders fund has been in the top decile among its competitors, delivering 20 per cent of annualised alpha on a net basis over the last three years.

Sharma joined Morgan Stanley Investment Management (MSIM) in 1996 as an associate in the emerging markets group based in Mumbai. Between 1997 and 1998 he traveled extensively across Asia covering the East Asian financial crisis.

He was assigned to run MSIM’s India office in 2000, and his India-dedicated funds were among the top performers in that category in 2001 and 2002.

In December 2002, at the age of 28, he was promoted to managing director, making him the youngest person to hold that title at Morgan Stanley.

He then moved to New York as head of the global emerging markets group, with seats on MSIM’s global asset allocation committee and its executive committee.

Sharma also helped build and oversee MSIM’s global macro business between 2003 and 2015. As a member of the global asset allocation committee, he co-managed global multi asset portfolios, which involved taking both long and short positions across asset classes.

In 2016, MSIM named Ruchir chief global strategist, in addition to his responsibilities as head of the global emerging markets team and the active international equity business.

His extensive research helped him pen masterpieces such as –The 10 Rules of Successful Nations, The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in a Post-Crisis World and Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the next Economic Miracles.

He has been writing columns on economics and politics for dailies and magazines for the last 30 years.

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