While some regard emerging market bonds as punchy play in the often stolid world of fixed income investing, others see the field as all too dependent on fickle sentiment.

At the turn of this year, the asset class was back in vogue just months after the nadir of the second quarter of 2020 — when outflows broke records amid the onset of the global coronavirus pandemic.

Investors returned en masse. Hopes of a rapid rollout of vaccines were rising, Joe Biden’s presidential victory was seen as positive for globalisation and cross-border trade. Meanwhile, extraordinarily loose monetary policy in the developed world meant “there was a crowding-out effect into emerging markets”, explains Jonathan Fortun, an economist at the Institute of International Finance, an industry association.