Building With BRICs: Brazil, Russia, India and China are growing fast-but investments should be...

Until about a month ago, investing in emerging markets seemed easy: just buy the stocks and watch them go up.

But stocks of emerging economies have the same unfortunate characteristic as stocks everywhere else-they don't merely move in one direction.

When the Chinese stock market dropped by nearly 10% on Feb. 27, it sent shockwaves through markets around the world and shook off the conventional wisdom that emerging markets were a one-way bet. Still, while it might seem as if the emerging-markets party is now over, some analysts suggest that there are some im