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[quote=YVONNE,280326]Russia funds had net inflows of more than $1 billion in the first quarter. They had underperformed for years, Mr. Durham said, because of fears about what Vladimir V. Putin, the president who tangled with the country’s oligarchs, might do next. But the election last month of Dmitry A. Medvedev to succeed Mr. Putin has quelled some of those concerns, Mr. Durham said.

“Now that the political situation in Russia has been clarified,” he said, “I think Russia is a pretty attractive market.”

When Justin Leverenz, who manages the $12 billion Oppenheimer Developing Markets fund, returned from Moscow recently, he was not raving about the investment opportunities there. Instead, Mr. Leverenz was more excited about the bargains he said he saw in technology companies whose fortunes are tied to the American economy.

He said he thought investors had turned too sour on some established franchises that depend on the West for much of their business. Two of his favorites are Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing and Infosys Technologies, a technology services company based in India. Taiwan Semiconductor’s profits have been growing more than 15 percent a year, but its stock now sells for about 12 times its per-share earnings “based on the view that semiconductors are cyclical and the U.S. economy is going down the toilet,” Mr. Leverenz said. “It’s seriously mispriced.”

Infosys, a prime beneficiary of the trend toward offshoring of technology services, is an “enormous” business that will be offering more software-based services to clients in the United States and Europe, he said. Its stock is cheaper now than during the dot-com boom of the late 1990’s, he said, because of the perception that there will be an “apocalyptic retreat” in spending on information technology.

Mr. Leverenz said he had also been buying shares of some of the biggest companies in Mexico, including Grupo Televisa, the broadcaster, and Banorte, a bank.

BUT despite being a Mandarin speaker who lived in and around China for 10 years, Mr. Leverenz said, he had relatively little money invested there.

“In my mind, China is the most durable emerging market in terms of breadth,” he said. But in recent years, he said, most stock prices there had become “just totally nonsensical.”

“The prices for much of the emerging world were wildly out of whack,” Mr. Leverenz said. “That’s why this year we’re seeing a big pullback. The math didn’t work. The underlying expectations were too high, and we’re getting a natural correction.”

The good news for investors who still have an appetite for emerging markets, he said, is that the cleanup after the storm is probably more than halfway complete.

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