While not an advocate of unsolicited email blasts, I did find the latest from The Global Guru to be of interest.  Focused on Africa, the article notes:

“…over the past decade or so, it looks like Africa is finally getting its economic act together. Just prior to the global financial meltdown, the IMF estimated GDP growth in the region would hit 6.6% this year. That means that if you take India and China out of the equation, sub-Saharan Africa actually is growing faster than Asia. With the notable exception of Zimbabwe, inflation in Africa is largely under control. Mobile phone penetration is soaring and boosting economic growth rates. Banking systems, which were too unsophisticated to have exposure to the subprime market, are rapidly expanding services to serve the emerging middle class. Foreign investment and loans to the region also are exploding, and have risen almost fivefold since 2000 to $53 billion last year. Long a region known for its “frontier markets,” sub-Saharan Africa has seen the IMF graduate a select group of countries — Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia — to the rank of “emerging markets.”

The Remarkable Rise of Africa: Stock Markets Boom

Early African investment pioneers such as Jim Rogers argue that growing investor interest in Africa — a continent where he has invested for more than 20 years — is a sign that he should sell. That’s probably an exaggeration. Although the number of funds focusing on sub-Saharan Africa has exploded in the past few years, investment in the region has hardly gone mainstream. But African markets aren’t nearly as tiny as you’d think. With a market capitalization of well over $100 billion, Africa’s markets are substantially larger than Central Europe and Russia were in the mid 1990s when they opened up to foreign investors. More importantly, African markets have been on a strong bull run. Between 1995 and 2005, African stocks showed compound annual growth of 22%. As London Junto panelist Francis Beddington of Insparo Asset Management pointed out, a further sign of Africa’s maturing capital markets is that the length of the terms of some countries’ government debt offerings has grown from six months to five years — or even longer.

The Remarkable Rise of Africa: The “New Russia”?

Nevertheless, Africa is no day-trader’s market. London Junto panelist David Damiba, of Renaissance Investment Management, characterized his investments in the region as a combination of privately and publicly traded equity. This is not a day-trader’s market. Not unsurprisingly, his firm Renaissance Capital made its first fortune investing in Russia. The parallels between Russia and Africa are surprisingly accurate. Like Russia, Africa is characterized by high political risk, an uncertain legal climate, and some highly undervalued resource-based companies.

And investing in Africa is no cakewalk. Images of child soldiers, civil war, starvation, and corruption are not images fund managers are keen to propagate. Yet they are part of sub-Saharan Africa’s daily reality. The lifespan of Africans is still declining, and 60% of the world’s AIDS victims are African. Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa have all experienced political setbacks recently. Sudan and Congo, two of the region’s largest countries, are ravaged by strife and misgovernment. Once the pride of southern Africa, Zimbabwe is arguably the world’s biggest macroeconomic basket case. More than 70% of Nigeria’s 140 million citizens live on less than $1 a day. Nigeria’s government rates even worse than Russia on measures of corruption. Corruption is endemic and Nigeria’s government rates even worse than Russia on measures of corruption.

Yes, Africa’s progress during the past few years has been remarkable. Damiba pointed out that he has interviewed more than 75 highly qualified native Africans educated at the top U.S. universities who are anxious to build their careers on the back of Africa’s emerging capital markets. That would have been unthinkable only a decade ago. This educated elite projects a very different image to the world than Uganda’s Idi Amin did in the 1970s with his collection of 365 Roll Royces — one for each day of the year. One of the attendees at the Junto was a U.S. trained architect who is working with the state government of Lagos in Nigeria on a real estate development project similar to one that he could be working on anywhere else in the world.

No doubt, Africa has a long way to go. Skeptics in the Junto audience asked why you would risk any of your money in Africa when established western companies have now become such bargains. Here’s why. The best investment opportunities lie where perception differs from reality. Much like Russia and Central Europe in the early 1990s, Africa fits that bill perfectly. It’s generally hated. It’s undervalued. It’s difficult to invest there. But consider that in 1996, the entire market capitalization of Russia and Central and Eastern Europe was less than $30 billion — at the time, it was less than the market capitalization of Microsoft. Twelve years later, Russia alone had turned into a well over a $1 trillion market and Russians were buying up the most expensive properties in London. As Hermitage Capital founder and Russia’s largest investor Bill Browder observed: “Russia is sh*t. But as long as it gets a little less sh*tty, I make a lot of money.” You don’t need to be a starry-eyed optimist to realize the same logic may apply to Africa.”