As the Eurozone moves past its sovereign debt crisis, Europe exchange traded funds are rebounding, with some money managers pointing to a prime opportunity to get in on the cheap.
“The market environment is probably as good as it’s been over the last five years,” Guillaume Rambourg, who co-managed Gartmore Group Ltd. before starting hedge fund Verrazzano Capital SAS, said in a Bloomberg article. “The space is a lot less crowded. That means there is low-hanging fruit.”
European stocks are recovering to their pre-crisis levels, with the Stoxx Europe 600 Index recently touching its highest close since January 2008, reports Sara Sjolin for MarketWatch.
“Equities still remain in the uptrend albeit at the low range of the trend and we have continued to maintain our bullish bias on the market as we see the these historical low-end valuations being mispriced,” Atif Latif, director of trading at Guardian Stockbrokers, said in the MarketWatch article.
Investors can access European stocks through popular ETFs like the Vanguard FTSE Europe ETF (NYSEArca: VGK) and iShares Europe ETF (NYSEArca: IEV), The two ETFs include broad European equity exposure, including non-Eurozone members U.K. and Switzerland, which diminish some of the risks associated with investing in the Eurozone. VGK, the largest Europe ETF, is up 21.5% over the past year while IEV gained 20.8%. Underlying stocks show a price/prospective earnings ratio of 15.1% for VGK and 14.8% for IEV. [Risks Linger for Europe ETFs]