In a recent episode of Behind the Ticker, Kevin Carter, founder of EMQQ Global, shared his journey into investment management and the inspiration behind his suite of emerging market internet ETFs, including INQQ, which focuses on India’s rapidly growing internet sector. With a background that began at Robertson Stephens in 1992 and included pioneering direct indexing and active indexing, Carter’s passion for emerging markets and digital transformation culminated in the creation of EMQQ Global and its targeted ETF offerings.
About Kevin Carter and EMQQ Global
Carter discussed the investment thesis for INQQ, highlighting India’s unique position as the world’s largest and fastest-growing emerging market. With a population exceeding 1.4 billion, robust demographics, and a booming middle class, India presents unparalleled opportunities for consumption-driven growth. Carter emphasized India’s ongoing infrastructure and technological advancements under Prime Minister Modi, particularly the “India Stack,” a revolutionary digital public infrastructure. The stack has transformed India’s economy by enabling biometric identification, digital payments, and financial inclusion for over 800 million people in just a few years.
Investment Strategy and Approach
INQQ provides investors exposure to the burgeoning internet sector in India, which Carter described as being in its early stages of growth. The ETF focuses on publicly traded Indian internet companies that meet market cap and liquidity thresholds, offering a diversified portfolio across various verticals, including e-commerce, payments, and online travel. Companies like Paytm and MakeMyTrip exemplify the opportunities available as digital adoption accelerates, with many sectors still in the nascent stages of development.
Carter underscored the importance of INQQ as a standalone investment opportunity within emerging markets, appealing to those seeking targeted exposure to India’s digital transformation.
Deeper Dive: Insights from the Full Conversation
Beyond the headline strategy, the full conversation between Brad and Kevin Carter covered several additional themes worth highlighting for advisors and investors.
On Process and Philosophy
We are glad to be back for 2025 and we start the year off with a great guest, Kevin Carter. He is the founder of EMQQ Global and we are talking about their Indian Internet ETF. The vast majority of this episode is Kevin going through how the Indian economy is the perfect emerging market, how they've structured all of their what he calls the stack to enable a really tech forward society. So for just education purposes but also for really what I believe after listening to Kevin a great investment opportunity, I think you're really going to enjoy this episode.
John Bogel did and started Vanguard. So I started by reading about indexing and efficient markets. But I quickly became an Omaha person when it comes to thinking about investing. And what happened was in 1999 I had my own idea for a better way brokerage so you could buy five dollars of a stock or ten dollars of a stock. And I developed a system filed a patent on it and built a company called the E Investing which we sold to each trade in the year 2000.
Market Context and Positioning
And then India has one other part of the story that nobody really knows I mean that a begging a black and white obviously a lot of you'll know about it but but for my experience most investors 99% of them. They have no idea about this next part which is called the India stack and it is I think a cheap code if you will or a secret weapon that that no other country has that that really sets the country apart.
And this is making your own custom S&P 500 strategy where you own the stocks directly and can customize and lost harvest and so forth. But what happened was we sold that company active index advisors to the Texas asset management at the very end of 2004. But just before that Google went public and when they did that they asked my partner Bert to give a talk to the employees about investing. And I wasn't invited but a few months later a person from Google called me and said they wanted to you know invest with us.
And it's really a big percentage of the world lives in emerging markets they have better demographics there are a lot younger than the developed countries. And that's driving a booming consumption which again it that is the thing that's emerging and if that's the list of why you're investing in emerging markets. It's really a question India is definitely perfect or at least it's as good as you can get because it not only has a large population it has the largest population in the world.
Notable Insights
"I believe out China India is bigger than every other emerging market combined so number two would be Indonesia so it's the biggest five far and it can't really there really won't be another country with this population and any of our lifetimes."
"It has about 750 million people under the age of 30 so twice as many people twice as many young people as we have population so it's the biggest ever the youngest ever."
Key Takeaways
- Carter discussed the investment thesis for INQQ, highlighting India’s unique position as the world’s largest and fastest-growing emerging market.
- INQQ provides investors exposure to the burgeoning internet sector in India, which Carter described as being in its early stages of growth.
- The ETF focuses on publicly traded Indian internet companies that meet market cap and liquidity thresholds, offering a diversified portfolio across various verticals, including e-commerce, payments, and online travel.
What This Means for Advisors
For financial advisors evaluating options for client portfolios, this conversation with Kevin Carter highlights important considerations around etf industry. Understanding the strategy behind each fund—not just the ticker—helps advisors make more informed allocation decisions and better communicate the rationale to clients.
Listen to the Full Episode
This article is based on an episode of Behind the Ticker, hosted by Brad Roth, Founder and CIO of THOR Financial Technologies. For the full conversation with Kevin Carter, including additional nuances and details, listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or watch on YouTube.