The International Value panel closed the formal sessions at the 2026 Ben Graham Conference, hosted by CFA Society New York and moderated by David Marcus of Evermore Global Advisors. Mark Cooper of MAC Alpha Capital Management, Christine Phillpotts of Ariel Investments, Julien Albertini of First Eagle Investments and Isaac Schwartz of Robotti & Company Advisors made the case that the best risk-adjusted opportunities in the world today sit outside the United States, in small caps and emerging markets that have been ignored for more than a decade.
Why Now
Albertini, deputy head of global value at First Eagle, a firm whose roots trace to a Dresden private bank founded in 1864, said it is simply an exciting time to be a benchmark-agnostic global investor. Traveling across sectors, geographies and market caps, his team keeps finding high-quality businesses with strong balance sheets, often family-owned, trading at attractive valuations once you look beyond U.S. large-cap technology. Phillpotts, who launched Ariel’s dedicated emerging-markets value strategy three years ago, added that EM fundamentals have inflected: earnings growth is not only accelerating but surpassing S&P 500 estimates, and earnings revisions have turned positive, even as the valuation discount to U.S. stocks has widened to roughly 40% on earnings and 60% on price-to-book. She called that disconnect one of the starkest of her career.
The most sweeping framing came from Cooper of MAC Alpha, a long-short global small-cap manager. His research, he said, shows that the combination of international, small and value is the cheapest it has been in at least 55 years, with U.S. large-cap growth more extreme than in 2000 or 1929.
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