Barron’s, May 14, 2016

Low oil prices are obviously bad for some emerging markets, such as Russia and Brazil. But they should be good for most of them, including India and China. Crude exporters represent just 20% of the global MSCI Emerging Markets Index, says Marcus Svedberg, chief economist at East Capital in Stockholm.

Markets have ignored this logic, however. Emerging market indexes have plummeted since the great oil crash began in mid-2014, and only started to recover as crude prices rebounded recently. Analysts who waited on an oil dividend for the developing world are giving up hope. “If you haven’t seen it for more than 20 months, you probably won’t see it now,” says John Baffes, who oversees the World Bank’s commodities forecasting. Here’s why:

Barrons, July 2016

A technological generation ago—the early 2000s—upstart software outsourcers from India like Tata Consultancy Services , Infosys , and Wipro wrought an industry revolution and put their country on the map as a global brain center. Now they are in danger of falling behind the times. Shares of all three have slumped over the past month or so after quarterly results disappointed on growth, margins, or both.

September 26, 2015

When Mark Mobius urges caution on emerging markets, you know they’re in trouble. The septuagenarian executive chairman of Franklin Templeton’s emerging-markets group has been boosting the asset class for decades, exhorting investors to pile back in after crises and meltdowns. Now, not so much. “Things have changed since the 1998, 2008, and 2011 downturns,” he says. “It would be dangerous to make an overall or categorywide judgment.”

July 18, 2015

The biggest ripple for investors from the landmark July 14 agreement that could free Iran from international economic sanctions in return for curtailing its nuclear program will be felt in the oil markets. They didn’t take the news well. The price of Brent crude fell 2.5%, to $57.06 a barrel, from what was already close to a four-month low, before falling a bit further later in the week.

July 11, 2015 2:22 a.m. ET

Chinese Internet companies, led by search provider Baidu and wide-ranging conglomerate Tencent Holdings, held their value for nearly a month after the broader Chinese market started crumbling in late May, and with good reason. These two fast-growing giants, along with Chinese e-commerce king Alibaba Group Holding and its upstart rival JD.com, are listed on U.S. and Hong Kong exchanges. They are bought by global tech investors a world away from the mom-and-pop Chinese punters who have been borrowing money to gamble on little-known companies traded in Shanghai or Shenzhen.

June 12, 2015

Evolving technology promises to revolutionize the way a vast nation shops and communicates. Online merchants’ sales grow geometrically, as do their losses. Investment banks proclaim they have seen the future, and it works with eye-popping stock-market multiples. Tech investors may feel like they have seen this movie before, but the backdrop is new: India.

Rotten broadband networks and dodgy electricity have kept India, population 1.25 billion, as the world’s sleeping digital giant, despite its depth of engineering talent. A leap forward in cellular, with smartphones selling as cheap as $40 and 3G rates dropping steeply, is set to change all that. The value of goods sold online will double this year to $7 billion, and keep on multiplying to $220 billion by 2030, Goldman Sachs projected in a report last month.

Iran: The Next Frontier?

Bibi Netanyahu and most of the U.S. Congress may still view Iran as an axis of evil. But a few brave analysts are starting to pitch it as something else: the next great emerging market. “Iran is the largest economy in the world by far that remains cut off from global markets,” says Charles Robertson, chief economist of Renaissance Capital, a London-based investment bank that had a good run in Russia and now wants to expand across the Middle East and Africa. “It’s like Turkey, but with 9% of the world’s oil reserves.”

March 7, 2015

Sovereign wealth funds swelled to a $7 trillion investing gorilla on a rich diet of oil windfalls, so it makes sense that they would lose some punch as oil prices fall. Marc Faber, a Barron’s Roundtable member and the editor of The Gloom, Boom & Doom Report newsletter, stressed at this year’s Roundtable that a tapering of sovereign-fund earnings would undermine global demand for securities in coming years.

Oil Dividend Proves Elusive for Emerging Markets

Shares of importers such as South Korea, Turkey, and Thailand haven’t enjoyed the expected boost from lower prices. What happened?.

By 

CRAIG MELLOW

Feb. 27, 2015 11:34 p.m. ET

Emerging Markets

It’s a common, and seemingly commonsensical, assumption these days that if oil-exporting emerging markets like Russia and Brazil have been hammered by sinking crude prices, oil-importing countries must be sailing. The hot performance of the two oil-buying BRICs, China and India, since the crash started last summer seems to cement the theory—except it doesn’t.

Emerging Markets: Sizing Up Debt’s Evil Twins — Barron’s

Petroleo Brasilieiro, better known as Petrobras, and Gazprom are terribly managed companies at the heart of the less-than-brilliantly-run economies of Brazil and Russia, respectively. Both have huge debts, which have become tougher to repay, thanks to diving energy prices and internal factors — a corruption scandal that is paralyzing Petrobras, and international sanctions that are keeping Gazprom out of bond markets.

But could either of these national champions actually default? Not likely, and that may spell opportunity for fixed-income investors who can hold their governance noses. “These credits are priced at distressed levels, while we foresee that they will repay,” says Max Wolman, senior investment manager at Aberdeen Asset Management in Scotland. “We are buying selectively.”