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Portfolio Insights by Brett Arends Archives | Email alerts
Nov. 4, 2011, 12:01 a.m. EDT
By Brett Arends, MarketWatch
BOSTON (MarketWatch) "” Buy Greece!
You heard me. I'm not crazy. Buy Greece!
OK, maybe I'm a little crazy. But I'm not totally kidding, either. Buy Greece!
But what about the crisis, you may ask?
Crisis, smishish. Buy Greece!
(Smishish, by the way, is a delightful Greek delicacy, involving pickled politicians' noses mashed with sheeps' brains.)
What about the referendum? What about the confidence vote?
The government could fall! There could be anarchy! (Anarchy, after all, is a Greek invention "” along with democracy, plutocracy, oligarchy, and, my emailers remind me, the gyro sandwich).
What kind of crazy person would invest at such a time?
OK.
And I have to admit the average American investor would be hard pressed to take the leap into Athens stocks. There is no U.S. fund that I know of that focuses on Greece. (Societe Generale offers an exchange-traded fund in Europe, the Lyxor MSCI Greece fund, but it is not marketed here). And there are only a handful of Greek stocks that trade here on the pink sheets.
Dow Jones' Terry Roth discusses the political implications if the Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou resigns.
But if you are an active investor, a sophisticated one, and you have access to international equities and derivatives, here are five reasons to think about it.
First, equities aren't government bonds. I have no interest in buying Greek government bonds, although the time may come when they offer a decent return. But stocks in companies are independent of the government. You're buying shares in shipping companies, retailers, life insurance companies, soft-drink bottlers and oil producers. They will persist.
Right now, says FactSet, the Greek stock market is cheap. It is trading at six times forecast earnings and half of book value. Okay, so we are depending on Greek accounting for those "book" values, but even so. The market sports a 6% dividend yield.
Second, equities are "real" assets, not nominal ones. If Greece drops out of the euro and relaunches the drachma, the country will regain control of its own economy and its own financial future. Yes, you can expect the drachma to fall. But that doesn't mean stocks will fall. On the contrary, they are likely to benefit.
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Brett Arends is an award-winning financial columnist with many years experience writing about markets, economics and personal finance in Europe and the U.S... Expand
Brett Arends is an award-winning financial columnist with many years experience writing about markets, economics and personal finance in Europe and the U.S. He has received an individual award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers for his financial writing, and was part of the Boston Herald team that won two others. He was educated at Cambridge and Oxford Universities, and has worked as an analyst at McKinsey & Co. He is a Chartered Financial Consultant (ChFC) and Accredited Asset Management Specialist (AAMS). His latest book, "Storm Proof Your Money," has just been published by John Wiley & Co. Collapse
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