Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. On Wednesday my wife became a Citizen of London at a bonkers ceremony dating back to the 13th century. She can now drive sheep (or any animal, we were reliably told by the Chamberlain) across London Bridge without paying a toll.

Which is useful as that was one of our biggest expenses. Rebecca was bestowed this honour because she was recently made a Freeman of Goldsmiths — one of the City’s ancient guilds. There are now more than a hundred livery companies and their ranking elicits much superciliousness.

Goldsmiths is number five. Mercers and Grocers are one and two. Further down, International Bankers sit at 106, just behind Management Consultants.

Humans love a pecking order, don’t they? Even equity teams had one when I was running money and I’m told it’s the same today. Top of the pops were US portfolio managers. Fair enough.

Everything about America matters. Behind them — no doubt with home bias but also due to London’s status as a financial centre — was the UK team. Those suave and multilingual European managers were next.

It was then a big drop to me and my beloved Japan colleagues. That was despite the Nikkei bestriding the world not long before. But it subsequently lost investors so much money over so many years that no one could be bothered with us.

An underweight position was assumed. Size and returns aren’t the only things that matter, though. China, for example, became an economic force almost three decades ago when it entered the World Trade Organization.

But its bourses — and Hong Kong’s by association — are considered madhouses, dominated by scattergun retail punters. Add to this China’s hundreds of thousands of state-owned enterprises and a meddling bureaucracy. No wonder few of us believe that portfolio managers can possibly know what on earth is going on there — let alone make intelligent buy and sell decisions.

Gambling isn’t respected. And frankly that’s what many stock exchanges amount to — particularly in emerging markets. This is why EM teams have been near the bottom of the pile for as long as I can remember.

Only frontier managers are beneath them. Happily, none of them gives a banana. They’re the nicest people and have amazing business trips to Asia and South America and beyond.

Hardly in the office. Apart from elite athletes, few professionals are massaged more. You need feet on the ground, EM managers would retort.

We’re visiting companies! Looking company bosses in the eye. It’s the only way to understand what’s going on in Brazil, Hungary or Indonesia. Of course it is.

Enjoy Bali. That it’s easier to generate alpha in EM is core to the sales pitch. Whereas returns are arbitraged away in developed markets faster than you can say high-frequency trading, in places such as Latin America, no.

Share a steak with an Argentine executive and you’ll hear stuff investors thousands of miles away cannot. Call it insider knowledge. Call it an edge.

Either way I prefer my portfolio managers to have both if they can. And for sure there’s more potential in emerging markets simply because companies are less transparent and less analysed. Or at least that’s why I had a rush of blood to the head when I dived back into equities in March and instead of buying a Latin American exchange traded fund bought an investment trust instead.

I also liked the discount it was trading at compared with its net asset value. Trouble is, just because there is more alpha on the table (the chance to beat the index return) doesn’t mean you will only pick winners. A wide dispersion of returns means there’s an equal chance of underperformance.

And that, it seems, is what is going on in my Lat Am Trust. It has been by far the worst performer of all my funds over the past six months with a drop of 5 per cent. Even...