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Sunday, November 8th 07:00 | 09:30 (Sin/HK)
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Investors should put their cash to work and focus on leading economic indicators, and not lagging indicators such as the unemployment rate, advised Daphne Roth, head of equity research at ABN AMRO Private Banking.
"We believe that the stimulus and the inventory rebuilding (are) going to continue because production has actually fallen more than demand," Roth explained on CNBC Asia Pacific's Protect Your Wealth.
"And a lot of companies have been cutting costs, and so operating leverage is very high. Any pick up in demand is going to fall straight into the bottom line and that's what we have seen in the U.S. reporting season, like (with) Alcoa [AA
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As such, Roth is overweight equities but selective in her choice. She favors large, growth companies and cyclical stocks over defensives.
"For this quarter, our theme is big is beautiful. Focus on companies with big brand names, with innovation and leadership qualities," she said. "We like BHP Billiton [BHP
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]. In the U.S., we like companies like Caterpillar [CAT
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], because one of the other focus is of course physical stimulus which only about 10-15 percent have gone through. So I think Caterpillar will continue to do well."
U.S. companies with big exposure to emerging markets are also good picks, as they stand to gain from the dollar's decline.
"If you look at the top (U.S.) 20 companies, the market share that come from outside of the U.S. is actually more than 47 percent, so these companies will benefit. In fact if the U.S. dollar goes down by about 10 percent, it will improve their bottom line by more than 3 percent. So those companies will continue to do well, and I don't think the market has actually priced that analysis," she said.
Comments? Questions? Send them in here.
Catch "Protect Your Wealth" on CNBC's Asia Pacific network every Tuesday on "CNBC's Cash Flow," Wednesday on "Asia Squawk Box" and Thursday on "Capital Connection."
Data is a real-time snapshot *Data is delayed at least 15 minutes