such as Russia and some Asian countries. In particular, three countries have recently performed a whole lot worse than my expectations, in effect denting any claims they can have in coming years for being considered serious (and independent) investment destinations. These three countries are Russia, South Korea and India: I have left out for now other countries that seem in greater danger of tipping over, such as Indonesia, as they were never considered anything more than exotic destinations. The three above though were talked of in some earnest as breaking their historic moulds but instead may well have been exposed as fraudsters being pulled up by the global economic prosperity. I show below the performance of the countries' equity indices and their currencies against the US average, and for good measure those of China. While the relative equity performance is nothing to boast about for China (indeed, as equity returns are currency adjusted it means that nominal performance in China was the worst across that column), the trio of Russia, South Korea and India show some eye-popping bad numbers. The most difficult to believe is the significant decline of the Korean won against the US dollar this year; shocking for a country that showed an improving current account balance until the middle of this year. YTD Equity Return % YTD Currency Return % Russia -72 -9.10 Korea -63 -49.62 India -62 -26.34 US -38 NA China -62 +6.33 This is however not all of the bad news - as the