The Art of Investing Across Developed and Emerging Health Markets
Most funds pick a lane. Here's why we don't — and what it costs and gains us.
The conventional wisdom in asset management is to specialize tightly. Pick developed markets or emerging markets. Pick a sector. Go deep. And for a lot of strategies, that's the right approach. But healthcare is a sector where I've come to believe that spanning both worlds offers a genuine analytical edge — not just portfolio diversification, but actual informational advantages that you can't get by staying on one side of the fence.
What developed markets teach you
If you want to understand where healthcare is going globally, you spend time in the U.S., Germany, Japan, and the UK. These are the markets where the R&D happens, where the regulatory frameworks are most developed, where new care delivery models get tested first. The companies I follow in U.S. managed care or European medical devices are not just investments — they're a window into what healthcare will look like in Indonesia or Brazil in ten to fifteen years.
Developed market healthcare is also where you find the deepest analytical ecosystem. There are brilliant sell-side analysts, decades of publicly available data, and a competitive intelligence network built on years of conference conversations. You can do rigorous work here. The tradeoff is that this depth is priced in. Finding genuine alpha in large-cap U.S. healthcare requires a differentiated view, and those are rare.
What emerging markets teach you
Emerging markets are the inverse. The analytical ecosystem is thinner. There's less coverage, less transparency, and the data quality is often genuinely challenging. But that's exactly where the opportunity lives. When fewer people are doing serious work on a market, the probability that mispricings exist — and persist — is much higher.
More importantly, emerging market healthcare companies are solving different problems in different ways, and some of those solutions are genuinely innovative. The community health worker model that's transformed maternal health outcomes in parts of East Africa is not a primitive predecessor to U.S. care delivery — it's a distinct model with lessons to teach. The mobile diagnostics infrastructure being built in South Asia is ahead of anything comparable in rural America.
"Innovation in healthcare doesn't flow in one direction. Some of the most interesting models I've seen originated in markets most investors never look at."
The synthesis
What I've found is that maintaining serious presence in both worlds makes you better at each. When I'm evaluating a telehealth platform in Southeast Asia, my understanding of how that model played out in the U.S. market gives me a real reference point. When I'm stress-testing a thesis on a U.S. specialty pharma company, my experience with how drug pricing and access works in emerging markets sharpens my thinking about what's sustainable.
It's not easy to maintain this kind of dual fluency. It requires more travel, more relationships, more reading. But for us, it's core to what we do — and core to why I believe we see things that more narrowly focused investors miss.