So farewell to the Brics. Well, to be more accurate, we can say goodbye to the Goldman Sachs fund named for the handy acronym penned by its then chief economist Jim O'Neill to describe Brazil, Russia, India and China and later South Africa. Goldman Sachs has closed the fund following years of poor returns.

According to data from Bloomberg, the Bric fund lost 21 per cent of its value in the five years to October 23rd when it was closed and endured a drop of 88 per cent in assets held under management from their peak in 2010. Goldman has merged the fund into the bigger Emerging Markets Equity Fund, with more than $100 billion (€93 billion) in assets under management.

Bloomberg quoted Goldman Sachs saying in an SEC filing that it didn’t expect the fund “to experience significant asset growth in the foreseeable future”.

These are more complicated times for emerging markets funds than the heady days of the early 2000s when the fund was symbolic of the big returns and apparently limitless possibility offered by them.

When O’Neill coined the phrase back in 2001 ( the fund debuted five years later), the Chinese economy was growing at 8.3 per cent and entering a decade of average growth of 9.1 per cent. Since then, things have moderated somewhat and the economy is growing by about 7 per cent.

The other four Brics have borne the brunt of the fall in global commodities prices, which was largely initiated by slowing growth in China triggering weaker demand for commodities.

In some ways, this highlights the problem of the Brics idea: linking dissimilar countries too closely. When O’Neill coined the acronym, he only meant it as a way of highlighting the rise of these nations and how the developed world needed to pay attention to them.

However, since then, the Brics themselves have sought to build on the idea and forge closer relations. They have launched a development bank to be based in Shanghai and held high-level meetings, even though some members – Russia, China and India especially – have long had fairly antagonistic relationships.

Oil prices

The Brics have also had to deal with other problems. Russia, struggling with lower oil prices, has been hit by sanctions over the invasion of

Ukraine

, Brazil has various domestic woes including a corruption scandal, and India, while doing well, has not performed as brightly as expected. Investors are waiting for prime minister

Narendra Modi

to push through reforms, although it remains one of the best of the emerging market bets.

These are interesting times for these types of investments, largely because China is becoming so dominant.

News that MSCI will include around 14 US-listed Chinese companies, including giants such as ecommerce group Alibaba and search engine Baidu, in its Emerging Markets stock index will see China make up nearly a quarter of the board.

MSCI is also working on including Chinese A-shares in the EM index too, which will increase China’s dominance still further.

If China rises to more than 40 per cent of the index, then that will leave investors too exposed to one country, analysts say.

Two years ago, O'Neill, who has since joined the UK treasury, told the Wall Street Journal that he had been disappointed by three out of the four original Bric countries.

“If I were to change it, I would just leave the ‘C’,” he said. “But then, I don’t think it would be much of an acronym.”