Those promoting good news from Russia are focused on the fact that Russia's equity indices are among the best performing in the world this year. The RTS Index is up 11 percent while MICEX is 18 percent ahead of where it started the year. That compares with a loss of 16 percent for the MSCI Emerging Markets Index (MSCI EM) and a drop of 4.5 percent for the U.S. S&P 500 index.
The bad news is that the main reason the indices have performed relatively well is because valuations were already very low coming into this year as foreign investors, i.e. those who did not need to have Russian exposure, had long since departed. So that combination of relatively few active investors and cheap valuations meant that the indices have basically been drifting with low volumes.
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