Bring up “frontier markets” and most investors envision a potpourri of nations primarily located in Africa or the Middle East. Not so fast, my friend. A closer inspection of the growing number of frontier mutual funds and ETFs, for instance, shows that at least in regards to some of them, there is very little correlation to the aforementioned regions. Consider the Claymore/BNY Mellon Frontier Markets ETF (NYSEArca: FRN). The fund uses an indexing approach and seeks to more or less replicate, before fees and expenses, an equity index called The Bank of New York Mellon New Frontier DR Index. What does that mean? A close inspection of the fund’s holdings shows that Poland (25.07%), Chile (23.55%) and Egypt (14.78%) account for a majority of the top country weightings, and moreover that financials account for 41.61% of the sector weighting. Per Matthew McCall, ...

ETF provider Van Eck Global filed with the SEC to launch two funds tracking Kuwait and Egypt.  The firm already has an ETF in its Market Vectors family that covers the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (including Kuwait, but not Egypt).  Though three other ETFs launched in 2008 cover the Middle East, the Van Eck filings will be the first ETFs to cover those two markets exclusively. You can find the prospectus for the two funds here.

You probably have heard about the riots going on in Egypt over the rising price and rationing of bread (wheat).

I only know what I read (here and here). Knowing what is really happening there is difficult as function of being far away and news accounts sometimes don’t correctly capture the essence of these things.

It is much easier to understand that part of what is causing the problem is a distortion of some sort in the price of soft and agricultural commodities. I say “some sort” because quantifying the distortion is not really the point and I doubt I am the person to do it. I think successful navigation is more important than successfully quantifying such an event.

Wild, wild price action, regardless of direction, happens every so often and the most important thing for most folks is simply to recognize something is not right and if …