24 February 2022: Russia invades Ukraine and its markets crash
When Russian forces invaded Ukraine, the Moscow stock market fell by roughly a third in a single day, and shares of companies like Gazprom and Sberbank collapsed. Western sanctions followed quickly, freezing much of Russia's central bank reserves. The Moscow exchange then halted stock trading for nearly a month. Foreign investors discovered that cheap emerging market stocks can become untradeable overnight.
The lesson: Political risk can turn a cheap-looking market into one you simply cannot sell.
What it meant for investors
$1,000 in RTS Index at the start of 2020 → $710 today, vs $2,092 in the S&P 500.
We start the clock at the start of 2020, the latest year on the wheel. That is a loss of $290, while a plain index fund over the same years made $1,092.
What RTS Index teaches: Market prices assume you can sell; sanctions and capital controls can make a quoted value meaningless, a risk no volatility measure captures.
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | $790 | $1,392 | $3,301 |
| 2018 | $1,150 | $957 | $2,519 |
| 2020 | $1,550 | $710 | $2,092 |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
What if you bought RTS Index? Every starting year and the full story →
More RTS Index history
- 17 August 1998: Russia devalues and defaults
- 25 December 1991: Gorbachev resigns and the Soviet Union ends
Could you have called it at the time? The wheel picks the year, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick.
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