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On the day Russia invaded Ukraine, Russia’s main stock index lost a third of its value.
A week later, in an interview on live television in Russia, a financial analyst was asked about investment strategy.
Foreign investors couldn’t sell their holdings, and there was a blanket ban on short-selling, which stopped traders from betting on falling prices.
But the market, such as it is, is down 20 percent from the day before the war, and more than 30 percent lower since the start of the year.
The Russian stock market was never as important to its national economy as its counterparts in the United States, Europe and elsewhere are to theirs.
Before the war, he said, his wife’s younger co-workers asked her for stock picks after they found out what he did for a living.
Sanctions are hitting the Russian economy hard, and the measures that Moscow is taking in response, including restricting access to foreign currency and raising interest rates, further limit what companies can do.
Analysts at IHS Markit expect the Russian economy to shrink 11 percent this year and inflation to more than triple, to over 20 percent.
Russia’s public companies, which tend to be the biggest and most international in scope, are increasingly cut off from foreign markets, especially if their owners are under Western sanctions.
Russian companies with listings on foreign markets, which continued to trade after the Moscow market was closed, have seen their values plunge to nearly zero.
Mr. Grapengiesser of East Capital said he had been getting “three calls a day” from foreign hedge funds looking to buy his Russian shares at steep discounts.
Even so, “the market reopening has performed above my expectations,” Mr. Grapengiesser said of the Moscow Exchange’s staged approach.
In recent history, Greece closed its market for five weeks in 2015 during its debt crisis, and Egypt halted trading for about eight weeks in 2011 amid the Arab Spring uprising.
Russia’s invasion on Ukraine has had a ripple effect across the globe, adding to the stock market’s woes and spooking investors.
Europe gets nearly 40 percent of its natural gas from Russia, and it is likely to be walloped with higher heating bills.
Russia is the world’s largest supplier of wheat; together, it and Ukraine account for nearly a quarter of total global exports.
The price of palladium, used in automotive exhaust systems and mobile phones, has been soaring amid fears that Russia, the world’s largest exporter of the metal, could be cut off from global markets.
William Silber, a finance professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, studied that episode and said market shutdowns tended to accomplish their goals.
Russia has prevented foreign investors from selling rubles for dollars.
During the 1914 closing, an unofficial trading floor sprang up in a building in downtown Manhattan, allowing investors to trade.
A stock market often serves as shorthand for how well an economy is doing, so the reopening of the Moscow Exchange is symbolically important for Russia, even if it comes with major caveats.