Certain investment themes become so well known that they merit their own acronym. One of those is the BRICs - shorthand for the popular emerging market countries Brazil, Russia, India and China. There are some investors and analysts, however, who are always looking for the next big thing. As Brazil, China and India become victims of their own success and begin to raise interest rates in order to cool their over-heated, inflation-prone economies, many investors are looking elsewhere to deploy their emerging market portfolio allocations. So prepare yourself for a new acronym: CIVETS For those people who are well versed in zoology, you may know that a civet is a nocturnal, cat-like, mostly arboreal mammal native to the tropics of Africa and Asia. But for our purposes, CIVETS stands for a group of countries that some analysts feel represent the next wave of emerging markets. They are: Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa. The CIVETS owe their acronym to the ...