With everything that has been going on in the Ukraine and Russia over the past several days, much has been written about the opportunity (or lack thereof) that comes as a result of these types of geopolitical events. Most of the commentary surrounds the fact that Russia is now very cheap relative to other regions and countries, and thus represents a good opportunity. In a previous whitepaper, we looked at using Value as a factor when investing across countries, and found it to be effective in generating outperformance vs. the benchmark.
As investors who are biased towards factor tilts, we thought it would be interesting to look at the valuation of the 32 countries in our universe based on 3 basic criteria: Forward Price/Earnings Ratio, Trailing 5 Year Price/Earnings Ratio, and Price/Book Ratio.
The table below includes rankings of each country based on each individual factor, as well as a composite rank that is the average of the 3 factor ranks. In addition, just for the sake of completeness, we included the actual measure of forward P/E so that readers could identify and measure any significant differences in valuation between countries. This data is as of 2/28/14, and is prior to the flare-up in the Ukraine.