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Xstrata, the Anglo-Swiss mining group, is perhaps not an obvious choice. But although advisers may not have encountered the company directly, they will most likely have selected funds that held it – or wished they had over the commodity boom, which accelerated last year and peaked in July.

It is hard to know where to categorise miners now. At the end of the last decade, they were considered a reliable but unexciting investment, the opposite of a company like Microsoft.

Then the emerging market boom began to align them to the new growth economies. This looked set to continue: Morgan Stanley reported in January that emerging markets would spend $21.7trn (£11trn) on infrastructure over the next decade – quite some growth driver for resource suppliers like Xstrata.

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