Simone Lovati 🇮🇹🇸🇬

What's going on in Indonesia re MSCI? The simple summary is this: Locals cornered and wash traded a bunch of stocks up, artificially boosting market cap & liquidity with the goal of achieving index inclusion & unloading into passive buying. In other words, they tried to game MSCI. This went on for years and was succeeding, but it eventually reached utterly egregious levels where almost half the market cap was "saham gorengan" (deep fried shares), and some of the said stocks were trading at P/E ratios of 500x. Retail investors also jumped in, as did local institutions who feared underperforming the local market cap weighted index (JCI). The market distortions eventually became so blatantly obvious that even blundering MSCI eventually realized they were being gamed, but their blunt processes were not equipped to differentiate between "real" and "fake" prices (pro tip MSCI, real stocks trade at 5-10x PEs and fake ones >100x). MSCI decided if their systems can't differentiate between the two, the easiest and most bureaucratic option was to just boot Indonesia out of the indices. The lack of appropriate domestic market supervision & safeguards against market manipulation can be criticized. However, OJK (the local regulator) has already been taking action. The prices of many saham gorengan have already fallen 80% since MSCI announced earlier this year it was freezing new inclusions and considering downgrading Indonesia to FM (frontier). However, manipulation is not always that easy to clamp down on, some of the activity has moved to offshore vehicles, Indo retail and local benchmark hugging institutions also participated, and, it must be said, some of the players are politically connected, putting OJK in a difficult position. But they have been moving in the right direction & progress has been made. That is what makes MSCI's most recent escalation of threatening to kick Indonesia not just out of EM into FM, but excluding it from FM as well, a little puzzling and draconian. MSCI's behaviour is in a way not that surprising though, as like rating agencies, it is bureaucratic and usually behind the curve. They kicked Nigeria out of the frontier index for instance after years of currency convertibility problems (during which it should have been excluded), but they did so right at the point when a new government had been elected and had just floated the currency. My take is that while Indonesian conduct bears a meaningful portion of the blame, so does MSCI/passive. With passive growing to become such a large force in financial markets, it was only a matter of time before it was gamed, and what we are also seeing here is some of the stuctural problems/limitations of passive investing. Passive works best when its a small part of the market that can free ride reasonably efficient markets driven by active investors. However, when passive grows to become sufficiently large it can become distortionary, and capable of driving major market inefficiency and being gamed/arbbed. Recent developments potentially provide a substantial buying opportunity for long term benchmark unaware investors, though it will require a long term focus and volatility tolerance to benefit from. Exclusion from major indices will structurally raise the Indonesian cost of equity and result in a potentially durable valuation discount. Long term investors can benefit from that in the form of higher returns priced into stocks, but that doesn't mean a fast (or even any) recovery in valuations will necessarily occur (though it could). There is still 8mths until MSCI's final decision so the market may be oversold short term (active might not dump until its actually excluded from indices), but there could also be a wall of forced selling coming mid next year. Indonesia has other problems to be sure (governance under Prabowo), but that is not the proximate cause of the recent sell-off - it is purely fears of downgrade triggering passive and offshore active outflows (if Indonesia is small, off benchmark, and not a good news story, many active instos won't bother with it), and investors are thus front running those anticipated outflows. I for one am a buyer.