Emerging-market stocks make `significant breakout'

Emerging-market stocks show enough strength to suggest their rally this year isn’t just a bounce, according to Ryan Detrick, a senior market strategist at LPL Financial Research. Detrick cited the ratio between the MSCI Emerging Markets and S&P 500 indexes, which rose this month to its highest reading since July 2015, in a blog posting Monday. The gauge’s “significant breakout” favors emerging markets, Detrick wrote, along with faster earnings growth and relatively low valuations. The MSCI index added 26 percent for the year through Wednesday.