2026 Sohn Montreal: Forget Japan, PIMCO’s Yacov Arnopolin Pitches a Frontier Carry Trade In Central Africa

Most of the ideas at the 2026 Sohn Montreal Investment Conference were equities. Yacov Arnopolin brought something different. He is a portfolio manager for emerging markets at PIMCO, and he opened by reminding the room that emerging markets are risky and frontier markets are riskier still. Then he made his case for one of them.

“What we seek to do in our portfolios in PIMCO is find opportunities that we can sprinkle across portfolios that we find to be liquid with attractive risk return,” he said. The catch he kept coming back to is duration. The trade he likes is short dated, “so that if things go wrong, investors have the opportunity to exit, hopefully to exit with a gain.”

The country is Nigeria, and the instrument is its short-term local-currency government debt, paying an annualized return of roughly 20%. Arnopolin framed it not as a bet on oil or on a single number, but as a reform story that the market is still pricing through an old lens. His argument, in one line: Nigeria is paying high yields not because it backed away from reform, but in spite of how far it has gone.

Arnopolin is a managing director and emerging-markets portfolio manager at PIMCO, one of the world’s largest fixed-income managers, reportedly running around $2 trillion in assets. He sits on the firm’s emerging-markets portfolio committee and has spent more than two decades investing across developing economies, working through sovereign debt restructurings, currency crises, and commodity cycles.