A trendy acronym is no substitute for an investment strategy.
Whether it's BRICs, TMT, MINTs, CIVETS or NUTS (OK , I made that one up), each has failed to live up to the hype at the time that they were coined.
BRICs, the emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China, was first coined by Goldman Sachs in the very early 2000s.
To be fair, it was only meant to be an economic grouping of countries rather than an investment theme.
Nonetheless, it was picked-up by many investment managers who said that every investor needed to have exposure to these emerging economies.
Let's see how the hype stacks up against reality. A reasonable proxy for how BRICs perform is the ASX-listed iStock BRIC ETF.
It's an exchange traded fund that tracks or mirrors the returns of shares listed in China as well as Brazilian, Russian and Indian shares.
The ETF's inception was towards the end of 2007 - just as the worst of the global financial crisis hit.
Emerging sharemarkets went down just as developed-country sharemarkets did during 2008, but the response of their economies varied.
China, by far the largest of the BRICs, was relatively unscathed, maintaining its very high GDP growth rates.
Russia was hit by recession and a financial markets crisis in 2009.
India was fairly resilient, while Brazil fell into recession.
Someone who invested $10,000 at the ETF's inception nine years ago would have about $7000 now, assuming distributions were reinvested.
On the other hand, $10,000 invested in US shares over the past nine years would be worth $15,000 today, and that's not including dividends.
Another acronym among the many that have not lived up to the hype is TMT, which stands for technology, media and telecoms.
Tech seemed like a good idea in early 2000s when the dotcom mania was at its peak. I remember receiving research reports on tech start-ups on huge valuations with no earnings and watched in amazement as the techology-laden US Nasdaq Composite index went higher and higher.
Local fund managers launched technology funds at a dollar a unit only months, weeks or days before the tech bubble burst in early 2000.
For example, the BT Technology Fund, launched in March 2000 as the BT TIME Fund (Telecommunications, Information and Media Enterprises Fund), fell to an exit unit price of about 19?? by August 2008.
Its performance has since improved, but the exit price is still about 75??.
There have been many other trendy investment themes that would have left any investors who followed them counting their losses.
There was the MINTs theme - Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria, Turkey - supposedly the next giant economies after the BRICs.
There was CIVETS - Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa.
Of course, the rise of China and India and others are huge stories and that will make lots of money for many investors.
But that will be a result of individual stock selection; not from slick acronyms created by investment banks.
Follow John Collett on Twitter.
