"Pretty much every year you get a fairly significant rally in emerging markets. It happened from the start of 2014, and from March 2015 ... The trough-to-peak rally in 2014 was 22.5 percent, and so far this year we have had about 22.5 percent," said Will Ballard, a fund manager at Aviva Investors.
But there are some positive signs in subsets of the emerging universe. With a basket of countries tracked by the Institute of International Finance, March growth quickened to an eight-month high of 3.3 percent.
The picture on trade, emerging markets' lifeblood, may also finally be improving — or at least deteriorating at a slower pace. Emerging exports declined 7.2 percent year-on-year in dollar terms in February, the smallest fall in 12 months, Capital Economics estimated.
And although Chinese first quarter economic growth came in at its slowest since 2009 at 6.7 pct, loans, retail sales and industrial output were better than forecast.
"This year's rally is because of things that didn't happen. The Chinese economy didn't fall off a cliff and there hasn't been an emerging market crisis as people expected," said William Jackson at Capital Economics.
Trade Winds
In the words of UBS analysts, emerging economic data still "fails to back sentiment," above all on trade. The ratio of global trade growth in volume terms versus economic output averages 1.07 these days, versus 1.6 in the mid-2000s and 2.2 in the 1990s. Slower Chinese and Western demand are to blame.
In dollars, emerging exports are declining by 10 percent annually, they calculate.
"We see this change as structural, and have consistently argued that emerging assets are wrongly assessed as being cheap because this change is not being incorporated into fair value models," UBS said.
It's mainly the historically low valuations after five years of underperformance that have been luring investors — MSCI's emerging equity index trades at a roughly 25 percent discount to developed peers.