On the theory that every investor likes to play a long shot once in a while, here’s an off-the-wall suggestion.

Take some mad money you don’t mind putting in harm’s way, and stake it for the next few years on an emerging markets stock mutual fund.

Not some prim-and-proper international fund, mind you, invested in the developed economies of Europe and Asia. Insist on a true “emerging markets” fund that wears the label proudly.

As a longstanding adherent of the conservative buy-and-hold school of investing, I can give you a dozen reasons why this is a terrible idea. That’s why it piques my interest it’s so contrarian it just might make sense.

You may remember the brief boomlet in emerging-markets investing that occurred around 1993. After the U.S. emerged triumphant from the Cold War, new capitalist spirits were stirring almost everywhere you looked from Indonesia to India, South America to South Africa.

The potential was enormous for growth and, as it turned out, for trouble too. In dispiriting succession came the Mexican peso crisis of 1994, the Asian debacle of 1997, and the Russian default of 1998. In the great tech wreck of 2000, guess who got caught with a fistful of computer and telecommunications stocks? Sure enough, those ragamuffin emerging markets funds.

Dwindling assets

At yearend 2000, all the 173 emerging markets stock funds tracked by the research firm of Morningstar Inc. in Chicago had just $14.7 billion in their coffers, down from a 1999 high of $22 billion. Even at the peak, the whole bunch amounted to barely half the assets of a single fund investing in more respectable ports of call, Capital Research & Management Co.’s $39 billion EuroPacific Growth Fund.

Investment performance? Awful. Emerging markets stock funds lost money in five of the last seven years. Since the end of 1995, according to Morningstar, they averaged an annual loss of 2 percent; for the 1990s as a whole, they produced the paltry payoff of 1 percent a year. For this you need the headaches of emerging-markets volatility and uncertainty?

The question marks still abound. When the U.S. economy catches cold, stock markets in emerging economies have a reputation for coming down with triple pneumonia. Lately, the U.S. has been sniffling ominously.

The sky’s-the-limit stories that emerging-markets fans used to tell are scarcely heard today. The old “the U.S. was once an emerging market too” patter no longer sells.

Even so, the growth potential to be found in emerging markets has hardly vanished. Morningstar puts the average earnings growth rate for the last three years of the 472 stocks in the Vanguard Emerging Markets Stock Index Fund at 31 percent, with a stock price-earnings multiple of 21. At the bargain-conscious Bernstein Emerging Markets Value Fund, Morningstar lists the P/E ratio as a parsimonious 12-to-1.

Tough to time

History shows it takes extraordinary skill, or luck, to time the mood swings in emerging markets successfully. In their two good years of recent vintage, the funds as a group gained 73 percent in 1993 and 72 percent in 1999, according to Morningstar. In other words, if you want to prospect successfully in this territory, you can’t wait for news that conditions are looking good.

For all we know, another run-up has started in the past few weeks. Vanguard Emerging Markets Index climbed 14.2 percent from Dec. 21 through the end of January.

No predictions here. At this late stage of my life, the last thing I want to do is become a short-term market forecaster. My point is, when these markets move, they tend to move fast.

Paradoxically, this sort of investment requires extra patience from fund investors. If you bought the emerging-markets story a decade ago, when these funds were just getting started, you’re still waiting for your ship to come in.

As I said at the outset, it’s a reach. But every once in a while investors need to test their contrary thinking circuits, if only to see that they still work.

Chet Currier is a columnist with Bloomberg News.