Money Talks Podcast: Riding the global stock market rollercoaster

Global financial markets were in a spin recently when the Japan's main stock index suffered its worst day in 37 years and stocks on Wall Street faced their sharpest decline in nearly two years.

Eddy Loh, chief investment officer of Maybank Group Wealth Management, tells Andrea Heng what this means for economies and for investors.

Here's an excerpt from the conversation: 

Eddy Loh: 
Even in terms of markets, we can look beyond the US. Global markets is not just about the US. An area of sweet spot where we feel is right now is Asia excluding Japan stocks, where the valuations are actually still a tad below historical average valuations and earnings growth trajectory is actually not too bad at all.

Andrea Heng: 
And you mean places like India?

Eddy: 

India, for example. South Korea, which is also quite exposed to the tech sector. And even closer to home, ASEAN. We particularly like, for example, the Malaysia markets, which have actually done pretty well this year. 

Andrea: 
Yeah, even their currency is doing quite well now. 

Eddy: 
Indeed. And we are very optimistic actually about some of the investment plans that the government has pushed out. And already we have seen actually quite a fair bit of flows of investments into the country. You have Penang as the "Silicon Valley of the East".

And then closer to home, we have the Johor-Singapore Special Economic Zone. I think that's going to bring about new business opportunities as well.

And then in the eastern side, Sarawak, they are considered as a new economic powerhouse because of the focus on green hydrogen, power, natural gas. So I think ... there's a lot of potential growth opportunities in that area ... And plus the fact overall as a region, Asian markets actually do offer quite a fair bit of dividends.

So with the expectations of lower rates, we think that dividend plays could also gain more traction.