The BlackRock Inc. money managers who correctly predicted this year's bumper inflows into emerging-market debt are now reining in bullish bets.
Returns from emerging market debt will slow to between 2 and 3 percent in the rest of the year, according to a note by Pablo Goldberg and Sergio Trigo Paz, who run the emerging market fixed-income team at the world's biggest fund manager.
"We believe the engines that took EM higher during the first half of the year are likely to lose thrust in the second half," Trigo Paz and Goldberg said in an emailed research note. "We might be slowly entering a period of quantitative tightening that the bond market might have to learn to digest."
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Bonds of developing nations have become a magnet for yield-starved investors this year after the U.S. Federal Reserve signaled it will raise interest rates only gradually. More than $40 billion of new investment has flooded into emerging-market debt funds during 21 straight weeks of inflows, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch research citing EPFR Global data.
