By Jeff Weniger, CFA
How emerging markets indexes are constructed matters, especially when the news cycle is dominated by Washington-Beijing relations.
On Twitter, my colleagues Brad Krom and Jeremy Schwartz have focused for weeks on the performance of emerging markets' state-owned enterprises (SOEs). The MSCI China Index was up 7.6% in the first nine months of 2019, yet the companies in it that are more than 20% government-owned were up just 0.2%. The low state-ownership firms returned 13.1% in the same time period.
Now broaden it out to the whole developing world. In the