Best buys July 2026 - 1 - Emerging Europe and Central Asia

We continue with a review of the emerging market stocks in my portfolio

I am starting to see good value in Poland again.

Regarding Central Asia, the Uzbek sovereign wealth fund was IPOed and listed in the London stock exchange but it does not trade at a discount and is not interesting right now, on top of having heavy politicised companies.

The Amazon/Ebay of Poland

The Q1 results were very satisfying with grow on all sides, leading to a 24% Adjusted EBITDA Growth. The international segment is still loss making.

Allegro started AI initiatives including a partnership with OpenAI to enable AI powered search and shopping experience.

Allegro entered health services and package travel markets: having such a large customer base enables the company to offer more services at a low acquisition cost: A core thesis to many of my investments in superapps.

As noted in my analysis, Allegro Pay fintech is a huge opportunity for a relatively small market capitalisation with a large customer base: we saw continued growth in this segment.

Loan origination up 37% YoY to PLN 3.9bn in Q1

Consumer loans contributed PLN 48m to Other Operating Income in Q1, up 125% YoY, as the share of self-funded loans grew up to 59% (+8pp YoY), reaching PLN 1.2bn

On June 25, it announced a share buyback program.

“25 June, 2026 | Allegro.eu announces the implementation of the Share Buyback Program (Phase 1) via open market transactions, for the purpose of share cancellation and reduction of the Company's share Capital”

The stock rebounded and is in my opinion set to become a darling of the polish stock market, after a disappointing IPO. While not extremely cheap at 18 forward times earnings, it is cheap on a market cap basis compared to the user base, especially considering the fintech business that is just starting out.

https://about.allegro.eu/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Allegro-investor-presentation-Q1-2026.pdf

Listed in London, the second largest bank of Kazakhstan trades at 4 times earnings and an approx estimated yield of 12-14%.

To adjust for the economic cycle, we see that the price to book value is 1.1, reasonably in the cheap range but not ultra cheap. These Kazakh banks seem to be over earning compared to the rest of the world.

It has a super app with 8 million monthly active users, but most of the income is net interest income, with b2b income very important at 57% of loans, providing exposure to the energy and mining focused economy.

I did not release a deep dive of Halyk. If you are interested, I am sure you could find articles and reviews online.

Below are 3 quality companies, each time under 10 times earnings. This is what I do at emerging value. I find and buy the cheapest earnings out there.