Money Chase Keeps Experts Circling Globe : Investments: Surging popularity in international mutual funds has created globetrotting specialists who rarely see home.

Got a yearning to see the world? Then become a diplomat, a sea captain--or the portfolio manager of an “emerging markets” mutual fund.

Just ask Michael Hoffman, who at age 31 runs the new Robertson Stephens Emerging Markets Fund from its headquarters in San Francisco or, more often, from a seat on an airplane bound for South America, Asia, Eastern Europe or Africa.

That makes him a member of a small but growing breed of globetrotting investment specialists, products of the surging popularity of international mutual funds, who are fast dispelling the image of money management as a 9-to-5 desk job.

“I’d say about a week a month is when I expect to see my office,” Hoffman said on a recent visit to New York.

Many international investment managers spend a lot of time checking out companies and economic conditions in foreign financial capitals such as Tokyo, London and Paris.

But an emerging markets specialist like Hoffman usually skips those staid locations in favor of places like Thailand, Turkey, Poland and Peru.

On one of several trips to South America in recent months, Hoffman picked up a parasite that has been “rather difficult to get rid of,” he says.

He also acknowledges that his profession probably is best suited to a young person without a spouse and children. “I don’t think I would succeed at this point in having a family,” he says.

But Hoffman also extols the benefits of such a life, which he first discovered while at the University of South Carolina getting a graduate degree in international business, and later as emerging markets portfolio manager at Cigna International Investment Advisers.

“Once I got a taste for the international travel, I haven’t looked back since,” he says. “You encounter many different cultures, different customs, different standards. I personally find it all fascinating.”

The idea of international investing is simply to expand your horizons beyond opportunities in the United States, which some view as a mature economy after several centuries of development.

Emerging markets, which offer some of the wildest and wooliest places anywhere to put your money, attract investors looking for the fastest growth rates of all--perhaps double the pace in the developed world.

But the risks can run high as well, operating in environments where the political climate may be unstable, the accounting standards highly variable, and the formal markets rudimentary at best.

After climbing 60%, 70% or more in some cases last year, emerging markets funds on average have suffered a 10% setback so far in 1994. Hoffman’s fund is too new to have a record.

“I very strongly believe in the long-term potential of these markets,” says Hoffman. “But you have to be broadly diversified across countries. Emerging markets are extremely volatile.

Faced with this increasing sophistication, Hoffman’s fund, unlike its typical competitor, uses a strategy known as short-selling, which is based on an assumption that a stock will fall.

Thus, if he believes a market or company is overpriced, he tries to profit by borrowing and selling shares of the local stock in question, or perhaps those of a publicly traded country fund. He hopes to repurchase the shares at a lower price, following the dictum “buy low and sell high” in reverse order.

Hoffman also aims to keep a part of the fund’s assets in pre-emerging markets, where capitalism itself may be just creeping into the picture.

Without the technology and communications advances of just the past few years, a portfolio manager making frequent 12, 15 or 20-hour flights around the world would have trouble keeping in touch with home base and the markets.

But Hoffman says portable computers, high-tech market information services, fax machines and similar gear keep him connected.