As the old saw has it, it is no longer a question of staying healthy. It is a question of finding a sickness that you like.

For the past few months, investors seem to have preferred the flickering pulse of Asia to the deathly pallor of the west. Offshore Asian equity funds racked up five consecutive weeks of inflows before Christmas, EPFR has reported. Since a trough in late October, Asian equities (excluding Japan) have outperformed global indices by about 10 per cent. As markets opened for the first full week of trading on Monday, rising stocks pushed the Asian benchmark to its longest sequence of daily gains in five years.