Stock Market Fun, with Dave Essel

Stock Market Fun

by Dave Essel

Prompted by LR’s post “Freefall on the Russian Stock Market”, I decided to visit the RTSI (www.rts.ru) website. It was good fun. The site is quick and responsive and the charts are something! Click and see a daily, yearly, weekly, monthly, yearly, or 3-year graph.

The way the markets reflect politics is simply wonderful. You don’t need to look further for proof that people put their money where their mouth is, or, in other words: where the mouth (i.e. the information) is, thither goes the money.

In this case, it is OUT of Russia. As well it should be if you value your assets…

LR’s chart from RTSI of November 12th is fine and dandy, but the RTSI site lets one play around and have much more fun.

Russian shares over three years is grand – a more or less steady rise (as fools leapfrog fools) until mid-2008, when even a complete idiot, i.e your average investment banker who reads the FT (with difficulty) and of course has no direct knowledge of Russia and allows himself to be kept informed of the local situation by local hirelings (with a vested interest and a half!), could see what Russia is really about:

Shame these people are too dim to find their way to LR, where crystal clarity reigned long before these problem-ettes.

Last week, when the Central Bank announced it could no longer afford to fling good money after bad in support of the rouble:

But the best one is Russia over 6 months. See below. What a picture of a country going down the toilet pan, as any one who knows Russia would have, could have, and did predict. That’s what you get for playing silly buggers in Estonia, sending tanks across your borders, and announcing you intend to put missiles into enclaves that someone should really have taken back from you ages ago, except that others actually stick to treaties.

P.S.:

A private confession: Back in the early 1970s, I concluded with absolute certainty that the USSR would collapse because its internal contradictions/collisions could not BUT lead to such an outcome. Of that I was certain, with the proviso – shame that it won’t be in my lifetime.

But hurray, hurray! I was wrong and lived to see that day the Commies ate humble pie.

Didn’t give me pleasure for long. RusNazis soon replaced them.

But these charts make me think they will be on the same diet soon (or on it already).