During the past quarter, the Fund significantly benefited from a Capital Gains rebate, which helped us crush the Shanghai Composite Index, which returned -1.6% for the quarter.
During the second quarter much attention was given to the MSCI’s decision as to whether or not China would be included within the MSCI index. Unfortunately, once again MSCI decided to delay the inclusion of China within the index. Much to the surprise of investors, the Chinese market reacted positively to this news which goes to show the strength and versatility of the Chinese economy. Another market event that seemed to never escape headline news was that of the United Kingdom’s decision to leave the European Union 28 nation bloc and based on article 50 of the Treaty on European Union introduced by the Lisbon Treaty. While most major markets, most notably the FTSE, were negatively affected by such an event, the Shanghai Composite only fell by 1% and outperformed every major market following this historic result.
Gross Domestic Product (GDP) seemed to stabilise around 7%, and many consider this level of growth to be the new normal as double digit growth levels are not be expected going forward but to hover around the 5% to 6 % mark. Economic indicators were also published during this period and the figure reported for Consumer Price Inflation (CPI) was that of 2.3% while exports were reported to decrease by 1.8% on a year to year basis.Data source: Bloomberg