Using Doing Business to pick stocks

Forbes have been using 'Doing Business' as a stock-picking guide:

We singled out the five countries, excluding the U.S., that scored above average in all the "Doing Business" criteria. Then we mined our databases for ten reasonably valued, U.S.-listed stocks issued by companies hailing from those countries.

The results were good but not great, and this year they've changed their approach. But really, we should expect that the best-performing portfolio would come from unexpectedly good performers - this year the highest climbers include Serbia and Rwanda. And Doing Business focuses on fairly small domestic companies, while Forbes look at US-listed firms with market capitalization of over $100million.

Forbes got one thing right, though, while looking for an excuse to buy Nokia stocks:

Scandinavia tends to make regulation relatively easy to comply with and worth it in terms of quality infrastructure and public services.