Kuroto Fund, L.P. - Q4 2007 Letter
Dear Partners and Friends,
Indonesia in Graphs
Despite having made great strides economically and politically over the past decade, Indonesia is still often portrayed in the Western media as an impoverished and troubled country. While there is no denying Indonesia’s problems, by focusing almost exclusively on negative news, the Western media is missing the bigger story of Indonesia’s steady improvement. To give a more balanced picture, we’ve assembled a series of graphs that lay out some of Indonesia’s highlights and lowlights as we see them.
In nominal terms, Indonesia’s GDP has grown at a compounded annual rate of fifteen percent over the past eight years, similar in nominal terms to China’s and India’s GDP growth over the same period. And, while we are not suggesting that nominal is real, we are suggesting that the true inflation rate differential between Indonesia, China and India is not as large as the last eight years of official inflation statistics indicate.
Given Indonesia’s rapid nominal GDP growth, it is not surprising that the earnings growth rate of publicly traded Indonesian corporations has been among the fastest in Asia. Importantly, this trend of rapidly rising earnings is projected to continue.
The Indonesian government’s debt has declined to less than half of GDP, down from twice that level at the start of the millennium. As other countries in the region, think India, have produced less than responsible budgets, Indonesia has remained fiscally conservative.
It is not just the public sector that has its debt under control. The whole of Indonesia’s economy is very underleveraged, creating a high return and low risk environment for well run financial businesses.
Despite being naturally well positioned for an influx of long-term oriented foreign capital, Indonesia has managed to almost wholly avoid the foreign direct investment (FDI) boom that has driven growth in much of the rest of Asia. While we don’t predict a near-term change in the labor law that has been holding up FDI, we are encouraged by President Yudhoyono’s desire to address this problem.
Indonesia ranks 143rd on the Transparency International corruption perceptions index, just barely beating out Nigeria and Angola but slightly behind Paraguay and Cameroon. While, Indonesia’s reputation continues to suffer on account of corruption, we only focus on the small fraction of listed companies that are run in an ethical and transparent fashion.
Fortunately or unfortunately, depending upon your perspective, the Indonesian stock market has risen just as much as the Indian and Chinese stock markets over the past four years. Needless to say, this recent quadrupling of the Jakarta Composite Index is making it difficult for value investors to find new Indonesia investment ideas at compelling valuations. That said, we are pleased to report that at 12.8% of partners’ capital, Indonesia remains our third largest country weighting.
Counterparty Risk, Operating Expenses & Liquidity Terms
With the demise of Bear Stearns focusing renewed attention on the financial soundness of primebrokers and other counterparties to hedge funds, we thought it appropriate to reprint the last paragraph of our 2007 second quarter letter. We’ve also enclosed an updated “Summary of Operations” report that details our current custody and prime brokerage relationships.
“Kuroto Fund has long taken a deliberate approach to counterparty risk management, carefully analyzing prospective counterparties and choosing to distribute our exposure across several firms if none stands out as a materially better risk. This past quarter, we took the additional step of segregating our custody assets from our prime brokerage assets. As we employ only modest amounts of leverage, we've been able to move a meaningful fraction of our long securities into a ring-fenced bank custody account at Northern Trust. While no account is completely free of counterparty risk, this, we believe, is as close as it comes. To the extent that we sell short and invest on margin, we will continue to hold a portion of our portfolio at Goldman Sachs and UBS. That said, the fund’s counterparty risk is now limited to a minimum given the portfolio structure.” (Kuroto 2007 2Q letter)
The improper allocation of operating expenses to limited partners led to the closure of a prominent New York-based hedge fund last month. In light of the high degree of discretion that fund managers have in this regard, we’re surprised that more examples of expense misallocation haven’t been uncovered. For our part, we allocate very few costs to our funds and provide a line-by-line accounting for all expense in our “Summary of Operations” report.
With respect to liquidity, ninety day irrevocable redemption notification is appropriate given the liquidity of the securities which we own. We take the fund’s liquidity terms very seriously and will never give preferential treatment to any limited partner.
Sincerely,
Sean Fieler
William W. Strong














