Hey, there are stocks beyond the headlines from China, Europe, and the U.S.–here are 6 from elswhere

So what’s happening everywhere else in the world?

Eyeballs are glued to the euro/Spanish/French/Greek debt crisis. Investors are shifting every data dump from the Federal Reserve, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and corporate earnings in the hope of figuring out if the U.S. economy is slowing—and how quickly. China’s momentum mavens are busy calculating how close the Chinese economy might be to a bottom and the odds that each piece of bad news might be the one to lead to the next round of stimulus from the People’s Bank of China.

But what about the rest of the world? What stock markets and what stocks should investors be watching—and maybe putting some money into–that aren’t Europe, or the United States, or China?

Investing somewhere besides the markets in the headlines assumes that you believe that none of the current crop of potential bad news rises to the level of catastrophe. If one of the world’s big economies and financial markets goes down hard, the likelihood is that it will take down everything. If China really hits a hard landing—with 5% growth and increased social unrest, for instance—it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to find safety—let alone profits—in one of the world’s other financial markets. One lesson from the post-Lehman crisis is that if it’s a big enough crisis, everything heads down at once.

If on the other hand, these potential crises don’t either turn into great big crises or really into a crisis at all, then the “everywhere else” markets could be either 1) profitable ways to leverage a positive result from any of the world’s headline grabbers, or 2) profitable ways to diversify a portfolio. Let me give the names of six stocks that exemplify those two groups. Read more