Emerging market stocks bounce as investors pour in

Global investors have poured billions of dollars into emerging markets, leaving the MSCI Emerging Markets index up over 80% March last year. 

Blast furnace at the Nizhny Tagil Iron and Steel Works
Rallying commodity prices will boost the asset class
(Image credit: © Donat Sorokin\TASS via Getty Images)

As “the old joke” has it, “an emerging market is one from which investors cannot emerge unscathed when things go wrong”, says Russ Mould of AJ Bell. Yet with commodity prices rallying and talk everywhere of a global upswing, today investors are more interested in what can go right.

Two-thirds of fund managers surveyed by Bank of America think emerging markets will be the best-performing major asset class this year, notes Jonathan Wheatley in the Financial Times. Around $17bn of overseas cash poured into 30 major developing countries during the first three weeks of January alone. Global investors had already ploughed nearly $180bn into emerging market stocks and bonds during the final quarter of last year. The MSCI Emerging Markets (EM) index has returned 83.7% since 23 March last year.

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Markets editor

Alex is an investment writer who has been contributing to MoneyWeek since 2015. He has been the magazine’s markets editor since 2019. 

Alex has a passion for demystifying the often arcane world of finance for a general readership. While financial media tends to focus compulsively on the latest trend, the best opportunities can lie forgotten elsewhere. 

He is especially interested in European equities – where his fluent French helps him to cover the continent’s largest bourse – and emerging markets, where his experience living in Beijing, and conversational Chinese, prove useful. 

Hailing from Leeds, he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the University of Oxford. He also holds a Master of Public Health from the University of Manchester.