A Requiem for Ukrainian Freedom

We mourn for the people who will die so that Putin can embarrass the West. And we mourn for what Ukraine will become. Once the smoke clears, anyone who’s running a business or has invested in their country’s future may be left with nothing to show for it. Foreign investors will be wary of Ukraine, too, making its economic prospects even bleaker. This thinking leads us back to the inherent dangers of investing in emerging markets. As you’ll recall, our Session tomorrow will feature Perth Tolle. She’s a Chinese-born American who founded Life + Liberty Indexes and is the creator of the Freedom 100 EM Index (ticker symbol: FRDM). FDRM is made up of stocks from some of the freest emerging markets on the planet. Perth zeroes in on emerging markets that exceed a set Human Freedom Index score. Then her team processes the data to create portfolio allocations, with stocks from freer countries getting more weight than less-free ones. After that, it’s all automatic. “Once we have the countries and their weights,” Perth tells me, “we look at the securities within the country and we take the 10 largest, most liquid securities.”