Jean-Charles Sambor, Lead Portfolio Manager, shares TT's International outlook on emerging-market debt and where they’re currently finding the most compelling opportunities.
Can you give an overview of the team running the fund and your investment process?
Jean-Charles (JC) Sambor leads TT's Emerging Markets Debt team, bringing over two decades of experience across global emerging markets. As Lead Portfolio Manager, he oversees portfolio construction, risk management and strategic positioning, drawing on a strong record of performance. Alongside Portfolio Managers Alex Zunega and Stefan Roessler, JC forms a leadership trio with over 50 years of combined experience.
The EM Debt team is made up of six investment members whose varied skills work well together and enhance the team's effectiveness. Supported by SMFG's long-term partnership and TT's wider EM ecosystem, spanning research, trading and ESG specialists across London, Hong Kong, India, Mexico and Brazil the team combines local insight with a global perspective.
Our investment process is highly active, value-driven and contrarian, investing across four risk buckets: sovereign credit, corporate credit, FX and rates. We focus on overlooked and mispriced opportunities where we have a genuine edge, applying a scenario-based, probability-driven approach to identify market blind spots. In FX and rates, we prioritise market structure and flows over macro forecasts, analysing local liquidity, regulation, investor behaviour and policy shifts. We believe alpha arises when macro or political events are interpreted asymmetrically by different investor groups.
What do you see as the big opportunities and risks for your fund for the rest of the year and moving into 2026? How are you positioned in this environment?
The Fed has started cutting rates. Against this backdrop, we believe the current "goldilocks" environment – where growth remains resilient, inflation continues to ease and carry strategies in EM enjoy strong tailwinds – cannot last indefinitely. Historically, extended reliance on carry has tended to end in disappointment once volatility returns.
Despite our short-term caution, we see the Fed's easing cycle as a major structural tailwind for EM. Lower US rates have historically driven sustainable inflows into emerging markets, and we expect this reallocation to accelerate. In our view, this represents one of the most significant shifts in the global investment landscape in years: capital returning to EM, supporting credit and local markets well beyond the immediate volatility around the Fed's near-term decisions.
We are invested across sovereigns, corporates, rates, and FX. In sovereigns, we like special situations such as Lebanon and Venezuela, and short-dated frontier credits like Senegal where we see mispriced default risk. In corporates, we hold selective distressed Chinese property names with recovery potential and prefer Ukrainian corporates over the sovereign. More generally, we see limited value in generic EM spreads. Despite appearing relatively cheap versus developed markets, we see little scope for sustained tightening in the current regime.In rates, we favour receivers in markets with credible policy frameworks, while remaining underweight China, Thailand, South Africa, and Chile. In FX, positioning is more balanced, with overweights in what we believe are undervalued currencies such as the Chilean peso and Indonesian rupiah, and underweights in crowded currencies like the Mexican peso and Thai baht.
Can you identify a couple of key investment opportunities you are playing at the moment in the portfolio?
Two of our most compelling opportunities at the moment are in sovereign special situations, particularly Venezuela and Lebanon. In Venezuela, the investment case is being reshaped by both improving fundamentals and a shifting policy backdrop. Rising oil output and stronger export flows are feeding through to the balance of payments, while the US Treasury's decision to renew Chevron's license and allow a limited return of Venezuelan crude to US refiners has reinforced expectations of gradual sanctions relief. This has improved access to hard currency and triggered a significant repricing across the sovereign and quasi-sovereign complex.
In Lebanon, we have seen the first tangible signs of institutional progress in years. Parliament finally approved a long-delayed bank restructuring law and created an oversight commission to supervise its implementation. At the same time, rating agencies have underscored that Eurobond repayments are likely to become a central part of the upcoming restructuring agenda. While the path remains complex, these developments suggest a clearer roadmap and a faster timeline than markets previously expected.
Together, these positions illustrate our approach to identifying asymmetric opportunities in distressed sovereigns, where reform momentum or policy normalisation can unlock meaningful upside even in highly dislocated markets.
