Forget the US, turn to Russia for profits

Russian stocks are looking properly cheap. If Donald Trump’s foreign policy can foster geopolitical stability, they could be a good place to stick your money, says Merryn Somerset Webb.

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Russian stocks are currently trading on an average price/earnings ratio of only eight times
(Image credit: © 2014 Bloomberg Finance LP)

This will come as a surprise to some of you. But I spent a large part of my childhood and early teens living in a bog standard suburb in the American Midwest. My mother was dating a Vietnam veteran who ran a carpet shop in a smallish town called Aurora. Nice man. We went to the baseball, did a lot of bowling and sometimes had breakfast in McDonald's. This probably makes me one of the few UK-based financial commentators who have lived among rather than just judged some of the tens of millions of people who voted for Donald Trump on Tuesday.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.