It’s hard to pick the best-performing fund management firms, even if you work in the fund industry yourself.

The same is true for stock-pickers working in banks and insurance companies, according to research by Aneel Keswani from London’s Cass Business School and David Stolin from Toulouse Business School — those analysts can’t pick winners in the sectors they work in.

One has already defaulted on its debt and the other is at risk of doing so, but Ivory Coast bonds are wildly outperforming those of Belize in JPMorgan’s new NEXGEM frontier bond index.

The index contains the debt of 18 frontier markets, and Ivory Coast was the best performing in January, after the borrower said at a roadshow in London last month that it hoped to resume making coupon payments on its debt this year.

Markets have a happy face on today, as they have for much of this year, as investors look forward to the promise of a second bail-out for Greece.

But it all hinges on agreement in debt talks between private sector creditors and the Greek government over the size of the haircut those creditors will have to wear on their Greek bond holdings.

The floodgates have opened for emerging market sovereign Eurobond issuers, who have been scrambling to take advantage of the new warm feeling towards riskier assets.

Latest to woo investors is Nigeria, which is on a two-day roadshow finishing today in Zurich, according to Thomson Reuters news and information service IFR.

Several Brazilian officials turned up bright and early at Thomson Reuters’ offices in London this morning, despite the snow and tricky local infrastructure (malfunctioning Tube trains), for an investment roundtable. (Here’ the  Reuters Insider broadcast of the event)

The officials, including undersecretary for public debt Paulo Valle, have been in London all week talking to bankers and investors. Some of the issues raised today included the continued imposition of the IOF tax on foreign purchases of domestic bonds, corporate governance and debt levels.

McDonalds, Volkswagen, Tesco — they are just a few of the Western companies which have issued offshore bonds denominated in China’s currency, the renminbi, in the past year or so.

The “dim sum” bond market has expanded rapidly in a short space of time, helped by the desire of international companies to get access to funds in an otherwise restricted currency. And why wouldn’t you — China is the world’s second largest economy, its currency is on an appreciation trend — even if slower than the U.S. would like — and growth prospects are still close to double digits, while plenty of Western economies are trying to fight off those minus numbers in their economic data.

Emerging debt investors are a fickle bunch, even when it comes to neighbouring economies like those of the former Soviet Union.

They are starting to feast their eyes once more on Belarus, which less than a year ago looked close to default, while Ukraine, a favourite of 2010, is going out of fashion.