Frontier Markets Puns

Before we get started: I posted something else about crypto recently, and things got heated. In part, I think that was because of the headline of the piece in question, which was provocative. So this time, I just want to say that I'm just speaking for myself here, offering a point of view as I work through some of my own thoughts that came out of recent conversations. You are very welcome to disagree with me, but please do keep it civil and on-topic. Thanks in advance.

As I see it, being a Boglehead is about simple, low-cost, broad-market, passive indexing of major investable asset classes. So back when I started out with globally indexing, one of the things that caught my attention was frontier markets. For context: frontier markets are tiny markets that are often too small, illiquid, and/or risky to be included in a typical emerging markets index. Together, these small markets only represent a few percent of the global stock market cap, but I thought maybe there was an opportunity to get in early and benefit from the risk/reward characteristics of these less-indexed countries.

But the more research I did, the more problems I found. For one thing, frontier market funds were more expensive. And since most (if not all) frontier funds seemed to overlap partly with low-cost emerging markets index funds, buying them would mean paying more for some redundancy. What I mean is: if I pay a 1% ER on a fund that has 1/3 overlap with another fund I own cheaply, I'd be effectively paying more like a 1.5% ER for that 2/3 I actually want.

Then, too, there was the size of these as a percent of the global market. I asked myself: is it really worth it to add something that will amount to less than 5% of my portfolio? I ultimately decided that no, it was not a meaningful enough percent to slice and dice for. In short: Given fees and size, frontier markets would have added more cost and complexity than I wanted to take on. Now consider these two ETFs for a moment:

FM - iShares MSCI Frontier and Select EM ETF

• 0.79% ER
• Just 27% in the largest country (Vietnam) followed by 8 more countries with 5%+ stakes

BITW - Bitwise 10 Crypto Index Fund ETF

• 2.50% ER
• Over 60% in the largest crypto (BTC) and 90% in just two coins (BTH and ETH) -- the rest are less than 5%

So FM is cheaper and more broadly diversified than BITW. And going back to my issues with FM: first there's that question of overlap. B

Hi all. I'm a 29-year old non-profit fundraiser interested in frontier markets. I've travelled a lot in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Middle East, and frankly find the energy of many of those growing economies exciting, and something I want to contribute to.

I'm from the US, lived in the UK, the Netherlands, and Czech Republic for a total of 5 years in Europe. I worked as a fundraising consultant for several small NGOs led by Syrian activists in Europe, developing projects and writing grants for Ministries of Foreign Affairs, primarily, along with a few private foundations. Currently I am the lead fundraiser for an international development organization that works in 20 countries. I do everything from prepare presentations to taking major donors out sailing. (I'm into hiking and sailing, but could probably get into golf if culturally necessary)

I have a Bachelor of Political Science from McGill University. I wrote my thesis on judicial corruption in Africa and Eastern Europe. I would imagine understanding local corruption is important for frontier markets. I have a Master of Public Policy from the University of Edinburgh (I wanted to be a diplomat once). I have an intermediate level of French (B2) and conversational level of Arabic (A2). I continue to take courses in both. I studied abroad in Lebanon, and my first job was for an organization developing hiking trails in the Middle East and promoting adventure tourism in the region.

I've run a consultancy in a foreign country, navigating bureaucracy in a language I don't speak, and I've built relationships with hospitality and tourism professionals in Palestine, Egypt, and Jordan. I know my way around a third-world foreign exchange market.

Questions:

1. If I get an MBA, do you think I could be considered for a job in private equity or VC? Specifically in frontier markets, because that's honestly what I'm interested in - not making the most money possible, although I wouldn't mind buying a boat someday.
2. Do you think I could ever culturally fit in this sector? Do people actually imitate the Wolf of Wall Street and brag about how late they stay at the office? If so, I'll stay where I am.
3. Gender reveal: I am a woman (!!!)

i'm looking at posts in this subreddit of people 1-2 years ago before covid insanity hit who bought 2012 frontiers with the same configuration above in the $10-$12k range. i'm almost certainly not going to get those types of deals now, but would you say $15k is too much? a lot of dealers are pricing these trucks in the $17-$19k range so even negotiating down to $15k might prove difficult.

Hey, I'd appreciate some EFT and/or stock recommendations for people interested in taking a risk in frontier markets like Vietnam as well as other large frontier Asian markets like Indonesia and more established emerging markets like Russia & China. And for all these places, I'd like focus on tech startups and/or other large technology companies/funds. New, never seen before technologies (of any kind). That's what I want to focus on. Thanks.

Hi Everyone,

Given how rapid the crypto markets are, I keep seeing people chasing the latest coin or constantly buying or selling the newest hot crypto. Some small % succeed (although I think a large part of that is luck) and the vast majority fails.

To that end, I've been working on app to compute the efficient frontier for a bunch of popular cryptocurrencies. Given that this forms the underpinnings of most finance -- I was hopeful people might find it useful when deciding what percentage of each coin to hold.

I've seen some other groups try to do something similar by also enticing people machine learning, ai, etc. Given that my own background is as a data scientist and statistician having worked in the finance space, I'm skeptical. I work on neural nets, random forests, and other techniques for a living and they barely outperform an index. Hedge funds literally spend 10-100's of millions to beat the market and even then they seldom succeed (although I will admit there are 1 or 2 exceptions after decades of work).

My goal is to avoid the hype -- I want to use the methodology established by Markowitz's Nobel Prize paper that forms the basis of Modern Portfolio Theory. The data is updated about monthly for two reasons: 1). trading all the time just generates a bunch of fees and this strategy is meant to be more of a diversified buy and hold so no need to constantly rebalance and 2) I'm still getting some of the code working.

Anyway, I've gotten a preliminary version of this working using the statistical programming language R. I'm not a web developer but I managed to get that R code up on the web using R Shiny and built in an authentication component using NodeJS (yes that took me some time!) on an AWS server. Authentication is done via Auth0 against a gmail account. This way I get no passwords (don't want the security headache) and can just whitelist users. Eventually I'll add other add ins like github/linkedin/facebook.

If you're interested in being a part of the project: by helping to code, defraying some of the expenses of the build, providing feedback, etc let me know. Happy to talk here, discord, zoom, whatever.

Thanks in advance!

Efficient Frontier Plot. You can select which coins to compare too.

[Daily and Yearly annualized returns.](https://preview.redd.it/vzwgmujdkef71.png?width=2866

Is The NFT Market a New Frontier for Independent Artists or Just Another Tech Bubble?

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Here is the link: https://www.listory.com/ll/5cdca329d243be0ec9a760cf4ac86b971b6a8871

Hey, I'd appreciate some EFT and/or stock recommendations for people interested in taking a risk in frontier markets like Vietnam as well as other large frontier Asian markets like Indonesia and more established emerging markets like Russia & China. And for all these places, I'd like focus on tech startups and/or other large technology companies/funds. New, never seen before technologies (of any kind). That's what I want to focus on. Thanks.

Hey, I'd appreciate some EFT and/or stock recommendations for people interested in taking a risk in frontier markets like Vietnam as well as other large frontier Asian markets like Indonesia and more established emerging markets like Russia & China. And for all these places, I'd like focus on tech startups and/or other large technology companies/funds. New, never seen before technologies (of any kind). That's what I want to focus on. Thanks.