Interesting quote from Franklin Templeton’s Mark Mobius, which I found over on Controlled Greed from January 5, 2007.

“Mobius says his Emerging Markets Small Cap Fund will place greater emphasis on the relatively small companies in more established emerging markets like Taiwan or Malaysia, rather than on the bigger stocks in frontier markets.  ‘Frontier is good if the stocks are cheap and overlooked,’ he says. ‘Otherwise, you’re better off in the bigger emerging markets.  A lot of these (frontier) markets have been picked over, and their prices have already gone up.  Very little money going into frontier markets can drive prices up quickly.’”

Contrast that with the sentiments of Christian Deseglise, HSBC’s global head of emerging markets, who said back in January that ”as mainstream emerging markets move to become high-income economies, it [only] makes sense to look at countries that are still in an embryonic stage of development.”