As Australia’s government aggressively pursues and wins free-trade agreements with regional neighbors, we’ve typically limited our analysis to what these deals mean for the country’s economy, sectors and, of course, companies.

However, this parochial view means that we’re necessarily overlooking the very countries to which Australia, itself, is turning for new growth. So just as Australia is looking toward fast-growing emerging Asia for new growth opportunities, it makes sense that we should do the same.

In my former life as a portfolio analyst for The Hulbert Financial Digest, the independent watchdog of the investment newsletter industry, one of my favorite analytical tools was surveying the portfolios of top-performing newsletters to see which securities they held in common.

The idea was that presumably the consensus stock picks of a group of long-term market beaters would be worthy of purchase.

In that spirit, I’ve gone and done the same thing, albeit with somewhat more stringent criteria.

Using Morningstar’s database, I screened the universe of funds that specialize in the Asia-Pacific region, excluding Japan. To meet the cut, each fund had to beat the MSCI Pacific ex-Japan Index over the trailing one-year, three-year, five-year and 10-year time periods. They also had to be led by seasoned fund managers, with at least five years of experience at the helm.

When researching mutual funds, I normally include investor friendly criteria, such as limiting my search to no-load funds, with low expense ratios and reasonable minimum investment thresholds, as well as whether the fund is open to new investors. But since we’re only interested in raiding the portfolios of top-performing funds, I ditched those constraints.

Nevertheless, the five funds that fulfilled my criteria also happened to boast many of those characteristics. In fact, all but Invesco’s offering are no-load funds, while Morningstar lists all as fully open to new investors except MAPTX:

Invesco Asia Pacific Growth A (ASIAX) (12/31/14)

Matthews Asian Growth & Income Investor (MACSX) (12/31/14)

Matthews Pacific Tiger Investor (MAPTX) (12/31/14)

T. Rowe Price New Asia (PRASX) (3/31/15)

Fidelity Emerging Asia (FSEAX) (2/28/15)

Since data for portfolio holdings is reported on a lag, I’ve also included the data cut-off for each portfolio in parentheses beside its ticker, so you can take that into account as well.

In terms of geography, in developed Asia, the funds had the strongest exposure to Hong Kong and South Korea, with an average of 14.4% and 10.9% of assets, respectively, invested in companies domiciled in each.  

In emerging Asia, BRIC constituents India and China commanded substantial assets, but that’s to be expected. In looking beyond these two behemoths, the top destinations for assets are Indonesia (with an average of 5.9% of assets invested in Indonesian companies), followed by Thailand (5.1%), Malaysia (4.5%) and the Philippines (4.1%).

Digging deeper, Morningstar’s Fund X-Ray tool allows us to see which stocks are most commonly held across these five funds.

The following eight companies were held in the portfolios of three or more of the aforementioned funds –the total number of funds that hold each stock is listed in the “Consensus Pick” column:

Unfortunately, most of these companies don’t suit the investment profile of the typical income-oriented Australian Edge subscriber. And none of them are formal recommendations.

But at the very least, the ones that do look promising at first glance certainly merit additional research, given their consensus status among top-performing funds.

While all of these names have U.S. listings, many of them trade on the over-the-counter market (OTC), and consequently some have extremely thin trading volume.

To that end, with the assumption that most subscribers are interested solely in U.S. listings, I’ve characterized the trading volume for the American depositary receipt (ADR) or foreign ordinary of each security.

In general, retail investors should avoid investing in companies with extremely thin trading volume, while even those with moderate liquidity likely require the use of limits when buying and selling to ensure that you receive the right price without moving the market on a slow trading day.

Of course, these are all companies with multi-billion-dollar market caps, so even the ones that are thinly traded in the U.S. presumably have ample trading volume in their home markets. But I’m assuming most subscribers aren’t about to place orders on the Indonesia Stock Exchange, even if they love the stock.