IslamicFinance.de

According to Grant Felgenhauer, a portfolio manager at Euphrates Iraq Fund, the opportunities offered by Iraqi equities overshadow anything else in the world today. Felgenhauer returned 28 percent last year with bets on Iraqi shares such as Bank of Baghdad, compared with a 9.5 percent decline for Iraq’s ISX General Index. That helped make New York-based Euphrates the fourth-best performing emerging-market fund managing more than $50 million in 2013. Iraq is drawing investors from specialized hedge funds to global banks including Citigroup and Standard Chartered as the oil-rich nation rebuilds 11 years after the U.S.-led invasion. The economy will expand 6.3 percent this year and crude production is estimated to rise to 9 million barrels a day by 2020.