Choosing where to look
The UK was selected as the proof-of-concept market on access grounds, not on cheapness.
Claim tested
That the cheapest, most neglected market is the right place to start.
Result
The most attractive market on the evidence was also the one I could not actually reach.
Consequence
A trading barrier can be insurmountable; an informational one, however severe, could have been worked around instead.
Two questions, deliberately separated
I started with what seemed like one question and turned out to be two: what is the most undesired industry, and what is the most undesired market. At the extremes these are anti-correlated. The most hated asset in any given year is hated because everyone is writing about why it is bad. Since the edge I was after was structural rather than analytical, the intersection mattered more than either axis on its own.
Industry: the answer that failed its own test
On the numbers, enterprise software was the most disliked sector in the market — forward multiples down from roughly 31x in late 2025 to around 22.7x by the first quarter of 2026, below the S&P 500 for the first time on record. It fails the coverage test comprehensively. Every large bank has published a view, and opinions get priced the morning they are printed.
The version of the same theme that does pass sits one layer down, in the labour-arbitrage services chain outside US large cap: Indian IT services, marketing services, business process outsourcing. That is a genuinely under-covered version of a well-covered idea. It is also a single macro thesis with correlated failure modes, which is worth noticing before treating it as three ideas rather than one.
Country: the mechanism I was looking for
| Market | CAPE | Vs own median | Access verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Indonesia | 9.3 | 1st percentile since 2001 (median 18.8) | Forced index-deletion selling — the access argument in its purest form, but the deletion criteria are partly a governance verdict |
| Philippines | 14.7 | Median 20.4; ~9.7x forward | Liquidity discount, not a risk discount. Excluded on cost of access |
| Turkey | 7.4 | 16th percentile (median 10.4) | Discount rate has permanently reset — the multiple is an equilibrium, not an error |
| Japan | — | ~47th percentile, fair rather than cheap | Partly closed. Small and mid tier still lags, but the pool is shallower than 18 months ago |
| UK small cap | — | Not the cheapest on the list | Selected. English filings, assessable governance, full retail broker access, and a genuine data-aggregation gap |
Every market statistic on this page carries an inline source link with a publication date.
Percentile cheapness only carries information when the discount rate is stationary. Cheap relative to an already-cheap baseline is far less informative than cheap relative to a normally expensive one — severe currency destruction and a policy rate in the thirties mean Turkey's multiple is an equilibrium rather than an error.
The Philippines was the more instructive failure
Not a crisis, just apathy — the index still below its pre-COVID level and roughly 31% below an all-time high set in January 2018, with nobody writing the "Philippines is cheap" article because there was no event to hang it on. The market is also shrinking: three common-share delistings against two IPOs in 2025, and value turnover of roughly six to seven billion pesos on an ordinary session — around 110 to 120 million dollars for the entire exchange.
At that turnover a ten-billion-dollar emerging markets fund is mechanically excluded no matter how the numbers look. Not by governance opacity or capital controls, simply by size.
Why I did not go to Manila
Because the barrier does not discriminate in my favour. This is the memorable bit.
A local broker, non-resident account opening, local custody and peso funding.
On the gross selling price of every sale, regardless of whether the trade made money.
Constitutional, sector by sector — part of anything a screen surfaces is simply not buyable.
In December 2025 local telecoms operators blocked access to my own broker's website on regulatory instruction.
The liquidity discount that makes the market cheap exists because capital cannot easily get in — and that barrier applies to me as well. The difference is that mine is surmountable at a cost while the fund's is not, so the question is only whether the cost is smaller than the discount. For a position of the size a student portfolio would take, it is not close.
What the UK gets right
Not cheapness. The UK small-cap market is not the cheapest thing on the list and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
What it has is the combination that makes a proof of concept executable: filings in English, a governance regime I can assess without a translator, full broker access at retail scale, gap closure demonstrably happening through takeover activity, and a genuine structural gap in data aggregation. AIM specifically is small enough, illiquid enough and unaggregated enough to be uneconomic for institutional coverage.
The honest framing is that the UK was chosen as the market where the process could be built and tested, not as the market where the opportunity is largest. Those are different questions and conflating them would have been convenient.