Singapore leads Asia Pacific in defensive investment choices

The country is brimming with lucrative telecommunications and utilities picks, says Russell Investments.

"Even though Singapore's GDP fell an annualized 1.1% in the three months through June from the previous quarter, this market has posted strong equity returns in July and year-to-date. The Singapore equity market offers a deeper selection of stocks in defensive areas such as telecommunications and utilities than other countries in the Asia Pacific region, which has led to country-specific investment opportunities," Sarah Lien, Senior Research Analyst for Russell Investments.

Singapore's relative wealth in defensive stocks led to its strong performance in the Russell Asia Pacific Index, which returned +4.4% year-to-date as of July 20th, yet has lost (-0.22%) for the month as of July 20th.

"Helping to drive the year-to-date return for the Index includes country constituents the Philippines (26.03%), Singapore (21.77%), Thailand (20.98%), Hong Kong (10.03%) and Malaysia (9.95%)." said Russell Investments.

Singapore, specifically, also returned 5.59% for the month as of July 20th, the highest among the 13 Asian countries included in the index.

In contrast, "country constituents China (2.57%), Indonesia (1.95%) and Japan (0.00%) have had the lowest returns year-to-date within the Index. Country constituent Indonesia moved upward thus far in July, returning 3.03%, while China (-0.46%) and Japan (-3.03%) lost ground for the same time period," it said.

"We continue to see some of the strongest performance this year from smaller markets like the Philippines and Thailand that have tended to be historically undercorrelated with macro weakness in other parts of the world," it added.