The Percent of Asian Stocks Underperforming may Have Turned the Corner

By now it's no secrete that stocks in the MSCI Pacific Index, which includes the largest stocks in Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, and New Zealand, has badly lagged the broader market in recent years (blue line below). Indeed, the MSCI Pacific Index has trailed the MSCI World Index by about 25% since 2009. A large part of this underperformance has been due to the fact that the percent of stocks Pacific region outperforming World Index has been below 50% most of the time (red line below). As recently as the middle of May the percent of stocks in the Pacific region outperforming the World Index got to just 15%. But this trend may have changed. Over last month this statistic jumped to as high as 34% and now stands at 30%, which is still at the low end of the historic range. Based on history, a mean reversion of the red line below would likely coincide with outperformance of the MSCI Pacific stocks relative to stocks in other regions.