Probably best to keep away from Sri Lanka at the moment
I would not touch Sri Lanka, even if someone pays me. They have serious human rights abuse, take Chinese and multiply it by 100 to start with. Though democracy, it is primarily governed by couple of families and the current ruling family has basically blundered the country. They got in bed with Chinese and borrowed money from them to pay for Chinese firms to “invest” in that country and it is not going good. I guess Pakistan did the same thing. They are basically insolvent and looking for emergency infusion of few hundred millions to pay for government employees and more importantly to provide some ‘ration’ to their poor people, who cannot afford to buy food because of skyrocketing prices. In a nutshell serious mess, brothers run the country, and they owe lots of money to China.
Moral of the story even Chinese geopolitical allies get royally screwed by China.
Separately, many emerging “markets” have serious problems below the surface. Unless you know a country, I don’t know why anyone want to go outside of US. My past infatuation with EEM, Chinese stocks are cured by BABA. Separately, I should have sold it when it is clear that Charlie owned a bunch.
Falling prices are twice as painful as rising prices are joyful
Oh, I would take it even if it is half true.
when they go up, there is mental agony of not buying enough and serious case of envy, greed, missing out gains etc and somehow one forgets all of that and kick yourself not selling when the price goes down.
In this cycle there is no joy. So when I see folks post prideful posts, that only accentuates the agony.
DopplerValue: My international stock ETFs are: * DFJ: WisdomTree Japan SmallCap Dividend Fund * DGS: WisdomTree Emerging Markets SmallCap Dividend Fund * MOTI: VanEck Vectors Morningstar International Moat ETF * IQIN: IQ 500 International ETF * DGRE: WisdomTree Emerging Markets Quality Dividend Growth Fund * GWX: SPDR S&P International Small Cap ETF * FNDC: Schwab Fundamental International Small Company Index ETF
If you need some lighter entertainment today with stocks falling then go back into Cathie Wood ARK and Saul’s (posts) holdings. What you are doing there is witnessing what often happens to the hero popular stocks they are generally posting up as owning. Over time things change with these obsessions and honestly it can be very shocking to see the “quality” of past holdings.
So Berkshire may fall 30% but you probably will not sell it then a likely will feel quite OK holding it. But when you have 100% SAAS holdings, a screaming red-hot sector today that will be ice-cold at some point, you will sell…and everybody will sell too.
There is a piece in FT, comparing BRK and ARKK. They are now almost tied for total return since start of 2020. There is an accompanying graph which shows the slow steady upward crawl of BRK stock price compared to the alpine peak and decline of ARKK.
In most of these comparisons, start and end points matter, and ARKK is still ahead in the 5 year chart: +200% to +80%.
