Don't Be Afraid to Invest in Emerging-Markets Stocks
In my February 2017 column, I wrote that the stocks of emerging markets, which had been languishing for six years, "present a special opportunity." It was a good call, but only temporarily. That year, the MSCI Emerging Markets index returned 37.3%, while Standard & Poor's 500-stock index, the U.S. benchmark, returned 21.8%. In 2018, however, the stocks of emerging markets got clobbered, performing far worse than those in the U.S. or other developed nations. Over the past 10 years, MSCI Emerging Markets has returned just 8.0% annualized, compared with 15.2% for the S&P 500.
The disparity is shocking. You can't just blame China, the largest emerging market by far. Although China's gross domestic product growth rate
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