Saudi is a winner, Argentina a loser, and Nigeria gets a stay of execution as MSCIannounces results of 2017 classification review. Saudi Arabia could get an upgrade to emerging markets status as soon as next year, MSCI said yesterday, setting it up to attract bns of inflows into listed equities as it placed the kingdom on a watch list for a potential upgrade. “The victory follows a years-long campaign by the country’s capital markets regulator and local stock exchange to carry out investor-friendly rule changes. They included facilitating access to foreigners and implementing T+2 settlement in order to attract funds from abroad, Bloomberg reports. Reuters also has the story. BlackRock welcomed the move, but signalled it thinks 2019 is a more likely upgrade target for Saudi.

While folks in Saudi may be smiling this morning, the mood is glum in Buenos Aires,where MSCI said it is too soon to upgrade Argentina to EM status “despite widespread investor expectations that it would be upgraded because of a host of market-friendly policies [President Mauricio] Macri implemented with the aim of opening up Argentina’s economy. Argentina will now remain relegated to the ranks of frontier markets for at least another year,” the Financial Times writes. That leaves Argentina on a frontier markets list that also includes Romania, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, Kenya, Kuwait, Bangladesh and Vietnam.

Nigeria got a stay of execution, with MSCI writing in a statement that its “decision on the potential removal of the MSCI Nigeria Index from the MSCI Frontier Markets Index has been delayed to November 2017 to allow more time for international institutional investors to better assess the effectiveness of the new FX trading window introduced by the Central Bank of Nigeria.” The news comes as Bloomberg reports that “Nigeria’s Half-Measures on Currency Are Only Half-Working.” Meanwhile, the index provider upgraded China ‘A’ shares to MSCI EM status.

You can read the full MSCI statement on its review here (pdf). And while you’re in afrontier and EM kind of mood this morning: Bloomberg suggests that while “robots are eating fund managers’ lunch” and driving a search for more “esoteric” assets in which humans could have an information advantage, the Financial Times writes that more and more managers are scouring the frontier “in a quest for the holy grail: fast-growing listed companies that remain almost completely unknown to investors.”