The S&P/ASX 200 (ASX: XJO) delivered a 1.6% gain across the week while all three US benchmarks shed more than 1% each.
Here are my three key investor takeaways from the week.
Know your index
Whilst passive and index-based strategies have an important role to play in offering diversified, low-cost exposures to some markets, the events in Russia have once again highlighted some of the risks associated with the structure.
The index provider is the only entity able to influence where investments are made, and the events in Russia showed the challenge of passive investments in emerging markets, which automatically formed part of this index.
They also highlighted the risk of trading global indices with less liquid stocks in the Australian market, with the massive moves in Russia stock prices making it difficult for emerging market strategies to remain consistent.
Government pressure on pension funds
It was somewhat surprising that it took several weeks and pressure from Treasurer Frydenberg for Australia’s default super funds to decide it was time to divest their Russian holdings.
But on Friday, they all but confirmed that they would be cutting a circa $2 billion allocation within the $2 trillion dollar sector.
Similarly to the ETF issue, it can be extremely difficult for members to quickly ascertain how much of their portfolio is exposed to Russia and other developing world countries.
Russia is exacerbating trends
Sticking with Russia, whilst the events have introduced geopolitical risk, they have essentially just exacerbated the economic trends already in play.
That is, an increasing inflation environment with the backdrop of a slowing global economy and a shortage of energy as a key contributor.
