By Jason Simpkins Associate Editor Air China announced yesterday (Wednesday) that it will buy 45 The Boeing Company (BA) jets to help cover increased domestic demand at a time when many Western airlines are struggling to overcome high fuel prices and declining traffic. Air China will buy 15 Boeing 777s and 30 Boeing 737s at a cost of $6.3 billion, the company said on its website. The purchase will increase Air China’s fleet by 35%, as the company competes with other Chinese carries for a dominant share of a market that is expected to grow 9% annually over the next several years, The Associated Press reported. Whereas commercial airlines in developed markets have been struggling, with some even collapsing under the weight of high fuel costs and sluggish demand, airplane manufacturers have been buoyed by strong demand in emerging markets ...

Things are progressing here at Emerginvest quite well, but this week has been mostly development on behind-the-scenes code, so there isn’t too much too report. Aside from that, we know that you, our users, enjoy our site for one reason: a shared passion for global financial trends and emerging markets. In light of that, I wanted to start writing a series posts that would be more pertinent for you. Topics I have in mind are: highlighting global information portals, commenting on insightful articles, and our perspective on major financial topics like portfolio diversification. For the first of these articles, I wanted to expound upon the last post and aggregate a list of high-quality emerging market and global economic blogs. Most of these authors are financial advisers and economists and I have yet to find a place which combines this wealth of information. This is by no means an exhaustive list, so ...

By Jason Simpkins Associate Editor Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. (MER) has raised its annual infrastructure-spending estimate for emerging markets by 80%, as developing countries try to keep pace with fast-growing economies and large cash reserves, BusinessWeek reported. Investment in infrastructure, which the firm sees as the long-term solution to inflation, will rise from $1.25 trillion to $2.25 trillion annually over the next three years. And China, the Middle East, and Russia will account for 70% of infrastructure spending. The report from Merrill Lynch pointed out that Xstrata PLC (OTC: XSRAY) recently predicted emerging markets would spend $22 trillion on infrastructure in the next 10 years. “That estimate is among the highest we’ve seen,” the report noted, “with an implied run rate of $6.6 trillion over the next three years.” Estimated Infrastructure Spending For the Next Three Year...

We are sometimes asked why emerging markets are so much more volatile than developed markets. The answer is that, due to their relative size, money flows between them cause most of the volatility effect.

Consider a real world situation that most of us have seen — a stream emptying in to a pond and another stream at the the other end of the pond draining the overflow.

Think of the streams as the emerging markets and the pond as the developed markets. Think of the water as money.

The water in the stream feeding the pond moves quickly. When the water enters the pond, it slows as it spreads out in the breadth and depth of the pond. When the water enters the stream draining the pond overflow, it moves quickly again.

The streams are narrow and shallow by comparison to the …

ETF market is booming. Let's have a look which ETF are currently the biggest in terms of assets value. SPY is still leading and has also biggest nominal increase year on year basis. Among top 10, the highest percentage assets increase has been seen for Emerging market EEM (63%). Followed by Gold GLD 51%.That's where ETF money had flowed in last 12 months. ETF Ticker Assets ($ mil) SPDR Index 500 (SPY) 75,121 iShares MSCI-EAFE (EFA) 47,363 ...

Let's see quick comparison between emerging markets and developed economies. I used ETF as a tool. IShares MSCI EAFA (EFA) as a benchmark for international stocks from developed economies. And IShares MSCI E.M.I.F. (EEM) for emerging markets. You can see there is only slight difference in P/E valuation.P/E ratio:EFA 11,5EEM 12,8Someone can say EEM is not real ETF to measure emerging market performance. That's partially true. More than half (53%) holdings are listed on US markets as ADR. In addition to that big share is from already developed countries like South Korea, Taiwan.The important thing is to compare EPS growth. From attached chart you can see that estimated earnings growth for 2008 is by 4,6 % faster than for EFA. Moreover both ETF are traded currently with premium against ...