Urbanization captures a deep pool of emerging market equities. There are over a thousand actively traded real estate stocks, alone, comprising over a trillion dollars of market capitalization and five billion in daily trade liquidity across over forty emerging market exchanges.

The study of cities, theoretically and specifically, can be a powerful investment edge. We find that, especially in emerging cities with high levels of new infrastructure investment, these fundamentals can be powerfully predictive of where productivity and prosperity are likely to increase, and where, in turn, the value of scarce assets that make up the place is likely to appreciate.

If the potential profitability of any investment edge is a function of 1) Its explanatory power that gives one a decision-making advantage 2) Its novelty or otherwise lack of widespread adoption, hence the existence of a market inefficiency not arbitraged away, and 3) Its applicability for deploying a large amount of capital, urbanization has all three.