The iShares MSCI Brazil Index (NYSE: EWZ ), an exchange-traded fund (ETF) that was the topic of the popular “Buy, Sell or Hold” feature on Monday , surged as much as 31% in the first three days of this week.
The shares, which closed Friday at $29.94, traded as high as $37.25 in late afternoon trading yesterday (Wednesday) – at that point representing an aggregate gain of 31% in the week’s first three days.
The ETF ended yesterday’s trading session at $35.89, an increase of $2.31 per share, or 6.88% for the day. At that closing price, EWZ shares had logged a gain of $4.05 a share, or 14%, since Money Morning Contributing Editor Horacio Marquez recommended the ETF in his Monday column.
Marquez is also the editor of the newly created Money Moves Alert trading service.
“Brazil is going to be a global powerhouse,” Marquez said in an interview yesterday. “Where else can you invest directly in the global oil industry, as you can here with Petrobras (ADR NYSE: PBR )? In fact, they play in all the key commodity sectors, including iron ore” – a key ingredient in steelmaking, by virtue of the Brazil-based Vale (ADR NYSE: RIO ), formerly known as Companhia Vale Rio.
Brazil has $200 billion in foreign-exchange reserves, is conservatively managed, has kept its interest rates well above its inflation rate, has seen its debt get upgraded to investment grade, and recently allowed its currency – the Real – to depreciate, a move that will transform the country into an exporting force, he said.
Marquez isn’t the only Money Morning editor with bullish views on Brazil. Martin Hutchinson, a veteran international banker who is a regular columnist for Money Morning, detailed Brazil’s debt-rating increase back in May, penned a two-part series on the so-called “BRIC” economies (Brazil, Russia, India and China) back in August, listed six of that country’s most-alluring profit plays in a report that just ran on Friday and then included Brazil as one of four “safe haven” markets in a column he wrote yesterday.
[To read Marquez’s full “Buy, Sell or Hold” column on Brazil, please click here . To read Hutchinson’s “Safe Haven” column, which mentions Brazil and three other promising overseas markets, please click here . Both reports are free of charge.]
$38.13 (10/30/08)
