Marc Farber and Mark Mobieus

Marc Farber and Mark Mobieus Opinion on SG and HK Stocks: Marc Farber thinks some plantation companies are reasonably interesting. For investment themes in the region, think Asian tourism is practically a no-brainer. Over the past two years, the way to do that was to own Macau casino stocks. Now they have gone up quite a lot, there is some risk there. But you can participate in the airline industry, which he thinks is still a good play on tourism. Prefer to own the airline servicing companies like SIA Engineering and ST Engineering as proxy to the tourism trade, as opposed to the airlines directly. Mark Mobieus very cautious on Chinese banks, tipping npls to increase as China expands. The heyday of property speculation in China is also over. Property companies in China will probably still do well but they are not going to boom like before. Going forward, areas in China that Templeton would want to get more exposure in are healthcare and education companies. These are two service sectors where the government finds it very difficult to keep up with demand, which is tremendous. Another area in which the Chinese are fast catching up is technology, like Lenovo, Companies like Lenovo are becoming more dominant in the area of computers. Tencent is another one but it is somewhat expensive. With the pending listing of Alibaba, all the Chinese tech stocks have been pushed up of late so you have to be careful because valuations may be expensive.