I once bought a Greece ETF when some news years ago mentioned the Greek stock market was struggling. Now I realized that said ETF has grown to be the third heaviest burden in my investment portfolio.
Then I Googled what’s going on there and found the linked article. It’s a bit strange how some country kind of falls into a blind spot in the news flow. Or maybe good news isn’t usually news. So that’s how it is.
Oh, the message must be 500 characters, right. Maybe Finland will also struggle for a while and then do a Greece.
That Hesari story is behind a paywall, but this Yle one isn’t; it’s just over a year older, but I bet the content is the same. Finland might be doing better too if we had received similar EU support, but we’re still on the side of the net contributors.
I was just looking at the ETF’s recent returns. About 18% this year. Since I’m just an ordinary chainsaw guy, I don’t have a clue if the market is in a bubble or something. The main thing is that it’s going up. Even a blind man hits the bullseye sometimes.
(But let’s not mention those Finnair investments, for example…)
What’s happening there in the economy? Already up 23% since the beginning of the year. It easily surpasses Hex! Doesn’t seem like many are following? Monologue
For example, half of the weight of the Global X MSCI Greece ETF consists of bank stocks. Greek banks have been on a tremendous run, many having risen 20-30% since the beginning of the year. I don’t know the matter in more depth, but I believe the reasons for the rise could be at least the previously low valuation of bank stocks, Greece’s recovered economic situation, which has restored investor confidence, and now the likely upcoming investment boom in the EU.
It is likely to Greece’s advantage that nothing special comes to mind about it at the moment. It is not very close to Russia geographically. There is probably no politician there who has caused international condemnation.
Perhaps they can now focus on developing their own country’s affairs better than in many other countries. Product tariffs are unlikely to affect tourism very much. Not directly, at least.
I compared the recovery of the Greek and Finnish indices. Greece rose over 7% in a week, and is already quite well up from the Trump dip. If the trend continued even close to this pattern, Greece would have a really good stock market year.
Monologue. But Greece ETF YTD return exceeded 60%. The novelty value of the product is the same as Prisma’s Feta cheese. But it’s running neck and neck in returns, for example, with Nvidia and Broadcom. Greece’s news value is zero, no reporting. Strange case. Suits me.
Addition. Total return in my investment portfolio 163%. I thought it would stall a while ago, but no…
I took a closer look at the content of the Greek stock exchange. For example, Alpha Bank’s stock price chart is quite shocking. ATH (All-Time High) is over 400 dollars. Now the price is under a dollar. If it were a human’s heart rate monitor, that person would be dead! I don’t really understand technical analysis, but if the previous ATH is the next resistance level for a rise, it will start slowing down the rise perhaps in 1000 years. With a chainsaw man’s logic, I’d say that Greece is pulling itself up from such a deep swamp that there might be enough upside potential for a long time. Trends tend to continue… And so much money has been pumped into it that it must surely show somewhere. If the Greek stock market frenzy starts appearing more prominently in global headlines, the party could begin. Or maybe not. Doesn’t matter. I’m sticking with it no matter what happens. But things look really good!!!
The Greece-Turkey spat is a separate issue. Greece spends so much on defense that Trump would likely pat them on the back. The Turkey-Greece dispute has also been overshadowed by the war in Ukraine.
A colleague enlightened me that there are several shipping companies on the stock exchange, in addition to banks. (And Greece has “enough” warships, too.) Trump’s tariffs could hit shipping activities hard, apparently.
"Greece has received 18 billion euros ($18.5 billion) in grants and loans from the European Union’s Recovery Fund since 2021, equivalent to about 8% of its economic output, the government said on Thursday.
Greece is eligible for a total of 36 billion euros in grants and loans from the post-pandemic fund until 2027 and the resources were expected to leverage total investment of more than 60 billion euros in medium-sized companies, green energy, digitisation and infrastructure."
It’s still thriving on EU money; how badly does Finland’s economy have to deteriorate before we get such amounts of support billions here?
If Finland needs similar help, it will probably be reminded of how Finland resisted the Greece package. I recall that those guarantee funds are still sitting in storage and Finland is losing out on their interest.
I Googled Greece. Moody’s seems to have raised Greece’s credit rating on 3/25, following others. The Economist had chosen Greece as the best economic performer or something in 2022-23. The credit rating upgrade had raised Greece’s level to “investment grade,” as I understood it. Moody’s assessment could partly explain the stock market’s recovery this year. I would assume that Greece’s good performance isn’t solely explained by the pumped-in aid. The pandemic also hit the tourism country hard, but it has recovered. Economic growth has picked up.
I’m a bit hooked on this Greece theme An interesting fact emerged from the attached report. Wage development constantly lags behind economic growth. This probably indicates that there is still plenty of labor available. Employment has improved significantly in recent years. Tourism probably employs a lot of low-skilled population: Hotel cleaning, reception… restaurants, taxis, guides, program services… On the other hand, it’s good that wage development doesn’t eat too much into companies’ profitability, though there’s a suspicion that wages are paid under the table, at least to gig workers. I should visit Greece sometime, it’s been on my mind for a while.
This is partly explained by the fact that more people are retiring from working life than new ones are entering. Young working-age people are also moving away, so the employment situation for those remaining improves.
Wage development, on the other hand, is explained by the fact that in countries with such a demographic structure, it is not possible to pay ever-increasing salaries in the public sector.
That’s right, I Googled the topic. In Greece, in past years, early retirement was encouraged - under 60 years old - to free up jobs. But now the retirement age has been raised to 67. There seemed to be quite few immigrants in the population, mostly from Albania.
