Legendary investor James Anderson views a globally distributed team with inherent communication friction as a benefit. This "grit in the system" prevents the team from getting sucked into reacting to daily market noise and helps them maintain focus on long-term, power-law returns.

While international markets have more volatility and lower trust, their biggest advantage is inefficiency. Many basic services are underdeveloped, creating enormous 'low-hanging fruit' opportunities. Providing a great, reliable service in a market where few things work well can create immense and durable value.

Advent leverages Europe's fragmented landscape of 44 nations, each with unique regulations and politics. This complexity creates inefficiencies and transformational deal opportunities, like corporate carve-outs, which are less common in the more uniform US market.

Active management is more viable in emerging markets than in the US. The largest EM ETF (EEM) has a high 0.72% expense ratio, the universe of stocks is twice as large as the US, and analyst coverage is sparse. This creates significant opportunities for skilled stock pickers to outperform passive strategies.

Many LPs focus solely on backing the 'best people.' However, a manager's chosen strategy and market (the 'neighborhood') is a more critical determinant of success. A brilliant manager playing a difficult game may underperform a good manager in a structurally advantaged area.

The proliferation of investing blogs has led to intense focus on US stocks. An analysis of popular sites showed 85% of ideas were US-based, with none from Australia or Japan. This saturation creates an information arbitrage opportunity for investors exploring less-covered international markets.

While public markets have more participants, Dan Sundheim finds them less competitive for long-term investors. Many public market players focus on short-term, non-fundamental factors. In private markets, there are fewer investors, but they are all doing the same deep, long-term intrinsic value analysis, making it a different kind of competition.

Rather than retreating from popular but crowded frontier market trades, bullish investors are expanding their search for alpha. They are moving further down the liquidity spectrum to find new, less-trafficked opportunities, signaling a deepening commitment to the asset class despite positioning concerns.

While the US offers deep capital markets where any deal can be priced, European financing is more binary: a deal either gets done or it doesn't. This market is driven by long-standing relationships rather than pure price discovery, which can result in cheaper capital for those with established networks.