melvin said:
Eurpoe side seems pretty quite? Why is this so? quite as in when we mention NASDAQ, dow jones, Nikkei, WSJ, hang seng.... that rings a bell but not europe...
You mean quiet? Well when I say emerging Europe I mean towards the Eastern European states which are just recovering from years of war and civil unrest and now starting to form companies and listing on their stock exchanges to seek foreign investment. Their domestic exchanges are not mature and also no out out of their country would know much about them, thats why there are various Emerging Europe mutual funds (unit trusts) where the fund managers 'specialise' in these countries, as in the supposedly would have the most extensive and the best research. Investors will see such oppurtunities as being able to get more return for their investment, but of course the risk factor is much higher as well. It's all part of risk return tradeoff. These economies are less politically stable, and the companies are newly IPO or not very established ones.
The mature europe markets in Europe would be your London FTSE, German DAX, French Bourse or the Swiss SWX. Investors see the socks on these exchanges as more evenly priced and more established, therefore the return they could get on their investment is less, but also means that risk is less. The credit rating of these companies are much higher than those in developing economics in Eastern EUrope.
Emerging Europe has been quite the buzzword in mutual funds for a couple of years now, and the returns on the funds have been pretty decent, much higher than your US or Singapore based equity funds.
The exchanges you listed are so well known because they are the biggest exchanges in the world, hence everyone would have heard of them before.
If interested, there a few local websites such as FundSupermart and DollarDEX which you can trade funds on. There is another forum which talks about unit trusts locally, but I forgot the URL.