Casual observers might think that 2016 was a disappointing year for so-called emerging markets. In fact, some of these countries have delivered the year’s best investment returns, while certain developed-country markets have fared poorly. If a United Kingdom resident who has personal obligations in Brazil had hedged all of his Brazilian real into sterling at the start of the year, he would have lost almost 50% of his investment.

Indeed, Brazil is not the only emerging country whose markets performed better than expected in 2016. But this is easy to miss when, more than 15 years after I coined the BRIC acronym (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), people are still lumping a diverse range of countries into a single “emerging markets” category which confuses more than it illuminates.