Good evening! New trades:
- 2023-12-07 +1 TQQQ @ $43.87
- 2023-12-07 +22 TQQQ @ $43.65
On November 2 SDN sanctions hit SPB Exchange (SPBEX). I now have ~500k RUB worth of locked securities at Tinkoff, valued at the market rate. Won't go into detail (everyone knows the situation), and it's hard to find polite words for it. The line that comes to mind: "never underestimate the predictability of poor decisions". The exchange's depository was Best Efforts Bank, in which the exchange itself owned more than 50% — had it been less than 50%, we would likely have been able to sell through other counterparties; but the bank was also blocked, and what happens next with the certificates is unclear.
SPB Exchange itself is silent. Tinkoff support either ignores requests or sends back the same boilerplate that "they are studying the situation". The CB seems to be in a wait-and-see mode and isn't taking action; the country's leadership has approved exchange of assets with foreign holders up to 100k RUB. A small amount, predictably, and even this mechanism — announced a month ago — hasn't been finalised. I wouldn't put much hope in it: the price/discount terms are unclear, and it's not obvious anyone on the other side wants to risk secondary sanctions to participate.
External circumstances aside, SPB Exchange and Tinkoff had 1.5 years to move client assets to a genuinely safe location and didn't. They loudly promoted "safe Hong Kong", and that pitch turned out poorly. Brokers like Finam, who didn't work with SPB Exchange, are in a much better spot today.
On the positive side — the US market is grinding to new highs, Nasdaq is close to its peak, TQQQ approaching $50. USDRUB is calm and looks like it might break below 90. I don't expect anything good in the long run though. Argentina just devalued its currency 100% under the new president. "Hopefully nothing like that happens here," I thought — then remembered that going from 70 to 100 is already +43%, and there's likely more.
Portfolio:
- TQQQ — 82.52%
- TCS Group — 6.35%
- Zynex — 3.66%
- Yandex — 1.29%
- KWG — 0.84%
- Times — 0.70%
- Baidu — 0.67%