According to a Street Authority piece posted Monday, that may well be in emerging markets, which by and large have disappointed investors in recent years with bear-market results.

"Emerging markets are expected to see especially large gains in GDP this year," writes Jimmy Butts of Street Authority. "In fact, the International Monetary Fund estimates that emerging-market GDP growth will average almost 6% in 2014 -- dwarfing the U.S.' roughly 2% GDP growth in recent years. IMF even expects some areas, like developing Asia (countries like Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia), to expand more than 7%"
Obviously, there are many ways to play emerging markets without taking on the risk of playing a particular national market. Butts recommends the iShares Emerging Markets Dividend ETF which provides the opportunity to capitalize on emerging markets (particularly in developing Asia), with the added kick of dividend payouts.

 "Currently yielding 4.65%, DVYE looks for some of the more established companies in emerging markets, paying special attention to companies that pay dividends," Butts writes. "To be included in the ETF, companies must have paid dividends over the past three years, which helps weed out riskier companies. This strategy helps avoid the large price fluctuations often found when investing in emerging markets."

 Though plenty of ink is used up daily trying to isolate the factors that move stocks, a piece by the Wall Street Journal's Greg Zuckerman takes an unusual approach to this task.
Zuckerman writes that it's important to "examine the issues that have the worrywarts up at night and the justification bears have for their downbeat outlooks"

 He breaks down the market into a handful of investor concerns – such as earnings, stocks valuations, China and global growth, and "what the Fed might do" -- assigning them a number from one to 10, with 10 being the most worrisome.

Right now, for example, he assigns earnings and the economy a worry level of eight. But, surprisingly, he only gives "stock valuations" a worry grade of four. That's because he only uses convention price-to-earnings measures based on a year of trailing or forward earnings, rather than also looking at earnings over a broader time period, as Yale economist Robert Shiller does. That could be a potentially troubling oversight since the Shiller numbers indicate that the market is far more overvalued than a conventional P/E ratio would indicate.

With apologies to Barrons.com's resident chartist, Michael Kahn, I'll close with a reference to a piece by financial adviser Rick Ferri which takes a critical look at the value of technical analysis.

"Trying to predict price trends by studying charts is a popular investment technique," writes Ferri. "In fact, technical analysis is probably the most common form of securities selection because anyone can do it without much training. Predicting that prices will rise because they have been rising is an easy decision. Avoiding securities that have trended down is another easy decision."

Ferri wonders whether the study of price trends leads to the right buy and sell decisions.

He concludes that "overall, the results from statistical tests indicate that individual investors who use technical analysis to make investment decisions are disproportionately prone to speculate on short-term stock-market trends, hold more concentrated portfolios, turn over those securities at a higher rate than people who do not use charts, and earn lower returns."

 Referring to a study done by Dutch academics, Ferri writes that "investors using technical analysis" underperformed those who didn't.

Ferri quotes Warren Buffett, no fan of chart-gazing, who reportedly joked about his failed efforts to incorporate technical analysis in his study of stocks before an audience at Vanderbilt University in 2005.

 "I realized that technical analysis didn't work when I turned the chart upside down and didn't get a different answer."