Masters in Business At The Money: Investing in Freedom
11 snips
Mar 25, 2026 
Perth Toll, founder of Life and Liberty Indexes and creator of the Freedom 100 EM ETF, builds freedom-weighted investment strategies. She explains why weighting countries by civil, political, and economic freedom can shape returns. Topics include data sources like Cato and Fraser, the role of press and rule of law for business viability, and how freedom links to risk and return in emerging markets.
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Freedom Weighting Reduces Autocrat Concentration
- Market-cap weighting overexposes investors to large autocracies and concentrated geopolitical risk.
- The Freedom Index reweights emerging markets by third-party country freedom scores from Cato and Fraser to favor freer countries where growth is more reliable.
Composite Freedom Scores Capture Interacting Risks
- Political, civil, and economic freedoms interact and must all be measured to assess country risk.
- Perth Toll uses composite scores from Cato and Fraser that combine 87 variables across speech, judiciary, property rights, taxes, and trade.
Prefer Independent Freedom Data Over Government-Funded Sources
- Use independent, privately funded data sources to avoid government coercion or political influence.
- Perth Toll chose Cato and Fraser because they take no government grants and remained objective after events like the World Bank doing-business controversy.