The following is an excerpt from Best ETFs for 2018: iShares Emerging Markets Dividend ETF Will Shine, originally published on InvestorPlace. It has been an ugly decade for most emerging markets. As a sector, they’ve been beaten like the proverbial red-headed stepchild. First, there was the 2008 meltdown. As the old Wall Street maxim goes, when the United States sneezes, the developing world catches a cold.

That’s pretty well sums up what happened during our mortgage crisis. In 2008, the S&P 500 lost about 37% of its value. The popular MSCI Emerging Markets index lost fully half of its value. But then, a funny thing happened. The U.S. economy finally hit bottom, and U.S. Alas, I can’t say the same for emerging markets.

About the time the U.S. Europe slid into a major crisis with Greece and the other “peripheral” economies that would last, off and on, for the next four years. Europe, like the U.S., is an important export market for many emerging markets. So weakness in the Old World put a major wet blanket on an emerging market recovery. We also had a major commodities and energy bust, major unrest in the Arab world and a string of corruption scandals in Latin America … all of which sent investors running for the doors.

But then, a funny thing happened. By early 2016, the bad news was finally fully priced in, and emerging markets found a bottom. It has been off to the races ever since. If you time a bull market in emerging market stocks correctly, you can make an absolute killing, doubling or tripling your position or more in just a few years. And I believe that’s the position we find ourselves in today. After years of chaos and upheaval, emerging markets are finally ready to shine again.

2 The fund is comprised of mostly BB and single-B rated corporate bonds. It’s even worse overseas. The European high yield bond market has been gobbled up so much, there is actually a negative spread between that market and United States 10-year Treasury bonds. European junk bonds are yielding roughly 2.17% while the U.S.

Further, pension funds and insurance companies hold billions of dollars’ worth of junk bonds to match their future liabilities. If these institutions need to sell their holdings in a liquidity crunch they could rush out of their junk bond positions, selling the ‘best’, most liquid, ones that they can. The worst ones aren’t likely to even be tradable.

Then you’ll see the real carnage. The ProShares Short High Yield ETF, SJB aims to return the inverse/opposite of the Markit iBoxx Liquid High Yield Index’s return for a single day. ] popping of the corporate bond bubble. HYG and its ‘junkier’ counterpart, JNK have enjoyed record inflows, but they could quickly see that money find a new home. The result could be a downward spiral as underlying physical bonds may be unable to be sold in an illiquid environment. SJB could prove to be one of the best inverse etfs of all.

While our next fund isn’t technically an inverse ETF, it mimics equity inverse ETFs as part of a bear market strategy. The Barclay’s I-Path S&P 500 VIX Shares, VXX, is a volatility exchange traded note designed to track the CBOE Market Volatility Index, VIX. Known as the ‘Fear Gauge’, the VIX is basically the price of insurance against the market, as measured by S&P put options. When the market sells off, especially in a crisis or panic, the VIX generally goes up.

The sustained, historic trough in volatility has lured many investors into an amazing sense of complacency. Further, many professionals have caught onto the natural negative roll yield that plague long VIX products and have been actually ‘shorting’ volatility to record levels. In fact, October was the least volatile month in the 27-years of recording the VIX, according to the CBOE.

2.4 billion is now invested with inverse volatility ETFs, according to Bloomberg.6 This amount is larger than fund allocations to some countries they add. The market’s reversal, when it happens, should cause the VIX to explode higher, helped along by the pending short covering. There are a number of related strategies such as low-volatility ETFs, option writing and risk parity which may add fuel to the fire if volatility rises.