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by Detrytus 980 days ago
So it seems that Buffet, ironically, does not follow his own advice of simply buying an ETF and holding it.

Also, I know some "celebrity traders" in Poland who advertise their IKE (think of it like a Polish version of Roth IRA account), where out of 170,000 PLN cash savings over 10-12 years they can get 1,800,000 PLN (for the average return of 37% per year) - how's that for beating the market?
2 comments
blagie 980 days ago
That's not very hard in an economy which has grown as quickly as Poland's.

Find another country which will have the same growth for the next 20 years, invest there, and you'll see similar results.

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Detrytus 980 days ago
Poland's economy is booming, but the Polish stock market is not. I mean, it peaked in 2007/2008, and hasn't been able to beat that All Time High since.

https://stooq.com/q/?s=wig20&c=20y&t=l&a=lg&b=0

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blagie 979 days ago
One of the problems is that for smaller economies (including Nigeria, below), investing requires local knowledge. A US index fund will roughly track the US economy. The 20 largest local companies in Poland? Not so much.

In other words, it's a place for active trading. Investing in the former Soviet companies at the time of the collapse of communism would have been a bad bet (but reflected in the WIG20). Investing in the startups displacing them? Great bet.

Real estate too. Having Polish land valued at a tiny fraction of German land in 1990 was clearly not long-term sustainable.

My expectation is that the Polish per-capita GDP will reach that of Western powers in at most a decade or two, which gives a natural 4x return over baseline. It's not the astronomical return of post-Soviet era, but it's still large.

In other words, smaller economies are a good place for active trading. I don't do it since if I did without local knowledge, my returns would be similar to the 1x of the WIG20, rather than the 10x of active traders in Poland.

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red-iron-pine 980 days ago
Africa... maybe. Not a lot of Nigerian ETFs, and where there are, they're heavily tilted towards foreign companies like Nestle or US oil.
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RishitJain 979 days ago
37% CAGR over a decade? Hope people aren't falling for that.
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