One saying that this column always has to keep in mind is “you can have cheap stocks and good news, just not both at the same time”. This means that to find value you sometimes have to go looking for companies where the prevailing wisdom is that things are bad and unlikely to get better, and investors need to do so for two reasons. First, it may mean the (unloved) shares are cheap (and the valuation, or price paid, is the ultimate arbiter of investment return). Second, it may not take much of an inflection point in news flow and business and earnings momentum to create the sort of positive surprise that could just persuade the market that the shares no longer deserve to be so cheap. Asia and emerging markets-focused Standard Chartered may just be a case in point. The three-pronged bear case is easy to establish. First, Asia, and China in particular, are big earners for the FTSE 100 constituent and at the moment all of the headlines tell us that Beijing’s economy is struggling under the weight of its burgeoning debt mountain, a real estate bust and trade tensions with the US. Second, the US dollar remains...