Alan Young

30 Emerging Market ETFs - Risk vs. Reward

This is not at all clear. What time period are you using to compute P/EG? How do you measure "earnings" and cash flow of an ETF--from the earnings/CF of its component stocks? Most ETFs don't compile those figures, so I wonder how you got them. And of course, ETFs don't have "earnings" and "cash flow" separate from their holdings, or at least not in a way that's relevant to their investment thesis, so I don't know what else it could mean. If you compiled all this info by looking up hundreds of individual stocks yourself, that's a terrific contribution; but somehow I doubt that.
So I'm just confused... please clarify.

A Complete Guide to Emerging Market ETFs

Thanks--another fine overview. I appreciate your thoroughness, and always learn something new from your articles.

Regarding the role of South Korea: first, its performance has correlated quite well with emerging markets (recently), so I'm not sure why you argue that funds which exclude it are ipso facto better investments.
Second, MSCI is hardly "insisting" on keeping it in the Emerging category; see www.marketwatch.com/st...
But after dithering on the point for a year, they certainly are overdue for a clarification.

Tweaking Nusbaum's El-Erian Portfolio via ETFs

I'm an avid reader of Nusbaum, and commented on this model when he posted it on his blog. One big disparity is that IGF is not really a way to own infrastructure (an asset class which delivers steady cash flow with minimal risk); a high percentage of this ETF is in industrial stocks.

But more essentially, there's more to El-Erian's asset management than having a diversified portfolio. A great deal of the book is about risk management, which ETFs don't do at all; and "secular" or long-term shifts in the predominance of asset classes, which require the ability to analyze long-term economic trends and adjust the asset balances accordingly. The percentages you list are an often-quoted AVERAGE of El-Erian's proposed allocations; using fixed allocations would make for only a crude imitation of his model.

And then, of course, as we learned a few months ago, there are times when asset allocation doesn't help you at all, and you need much broader risk-control techniques which are simply foreign to any kind of passive investment model.

There Are Many More Satyams Out There

Yes, but why call this an Emerging Markets phenomenon? Have we learned nothing from Enron, Lehman, AIG?