“In the volatile world of emerging markets, few assets hold up for long. Christopher Wood is one of them,” writes Craig Karmin in today’s Wall Street Journal.

“The 44-year-old equity strategist at CLSA Emerging Markets is the author of ‘Greed & Fear,’ a widely read weekly commentary that many avid followers say provides some of the most lively and candid insights into emerging markets.”

“In six years of publication, Mr. Wood has made more than his share of prescient calls. He was early to fret about Thailand’s financial problems in advance of its 1997 currency devaluation and was bullish on South Korean stocks last fall just before that market began its 90% surge. Though based in Jakarta, Indonesia, he has even been prescient on the U.S. front: Investors who followed his advice in the March 2000 report, ‘A Passion Spent,’ dumped their Nasdaq stocks practically at the peak.”

” ‘He’s refreshingly pessimistic,’ says Satyen Mehta, a regular reader and fund manager at J.P. Morgan Asset Management. ‘And unlike most strategists, he really knows how to write.’ That isn’t surprising: Mr. Wood started his career as a journalist and spent 10 years at the Economist magazine.”

“A born contrarian, Mr. Wood nevertheless rejects the label. ‘You can create a commercial niche for yourself by always being contrarian, but it doesn’t work,’ he says. ‘Because for extended periods, the consensus can be right. Trying to be different on everything will get you blown up.’

“That attitude hasn’t kept Mr. Wood from going out on a limb recently. At a time when many economists are trumpeting the start of a U.S. economic rebound, he forecasts a gloomy period for the economy and a meandering one for the U.S. stock market. He says the collapse of technology stocks and of Enron have set in motion a U.S. version of the financial crisis that ripped through Asia in 1997 and 1998. ‘Only it will be so much bigger than anything that ever happened in Asia,’ he says.”