When Antoine van Agtmael was traveling around Asia in the late 1970s, he became convinced there were companies worth investing in throughout the developing region. In 1981, while working for the World Bank's International Finance Corp., he presented an idea for a "third- world equity fund" to Salomon Brothers Inc.

"They told me we would never sell this fund," van Agtmael says, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its March issue. "They wanted a more-uplifting name. That's how we came up with the term emerging."

Today, van Agtmael remains bullish on what everyone now calls emerging markets.

"As a group, they're now as attractive as I have seen them, on both a historic and comparative basis, at any time in the last 25 years," says van Agtmael, who oversees $7.4 billion in emerging-markets equities at Ashmore EMM LLC in Arlington, Virginia. He's looking in particular at shares of companies in China and the Middle East.

That's in line with the results of Bloomberg Markets' first ranking of the most-promising emerging and frontier markets for investors. China topped the list, which is based on more than a dozen measures of the investing climate, from forecast gross domestic product growth to the ease of doing business. China was followed by Thailand, Peru and Chile. (IPSA)

David Fuller's view This view bodes well for many of Fullermoney's favourite long-term investment themes.