Disclaimer: I am not a financial adviser and you need to do your own research.
I won't repeat this good article on investing for effective altruists: https://80000hours.org/2015/10/common-investing-mistakes-in-the-effective-altruism-community/ . But one of the key ideas is if you are investing for yourself and you are young, or if you are investing for charity, temporary falls in value should not worry you. Taken even further, if there is a big payoff, but some chance of losing all your money, this can still be a good idea. This means that you are risk neutral, and just care about the expected (probability weighted) outcome. If you are like this, then I have an investment opportunity you may be interested in.
It is three times leveraged Russia. The Russian stock market has fallen precipitously, and it has fallen even more so from the US perspective because of currency changes. If it recovers to fair market value (mean reversion) over seven years, the value of your investment would be about four times as much. However, with three times leverage, even taking into account that you need to pay interest on the implicit loan, one would expect more like 50 times the money. Now there are impacts of volatility that I do not fully understand that could reduce this. But I have seen a 3X leverage produce 15 times as much money as the initial investment in 5 years and it was not quite as good an opportunity as Russia.
The downside of Russia is not just the normal potential for temporary loss of money. It is also possible that there could be a forced sell out of foreign assets, freezing of assets, or even seizing of assets, depending on international relations. So this is definitely not for the faint of heart.
But if you are risk neutral like I am, you may want to give it a try. The ticker is RUSL. I just put a significant fraction of my portfolio into it today.
Also, one could even argue that helping out Russia when it is worst off could prevent Russia from doing desperate things, so there may be global catastrophic risk benefits.
Update: March 17, 2016:
If you decided to invest when I did, congratulations - you have made 80% on your money in less than two months! This now means that the expected long-term return is significantly lower. Then when you include the volatility drag (see discussion below), it is not clear that this leveraged investment is better than just unleveraged Russia. So it might make sense to start phasing out of leveraged Russia and buying ERUS, especially if it is a large percent of your portfolio. On the other hand, if you think that oil price will continue rapidly reverting towards the long-term marginal cost of production, since Russia is highly correlated with oil price, you may want to stay in leveraged Russia longer.
Thanks for the good examples of volatility drag. This is very important for something as volatile as Russia. However, there is a tendency when valuations are very far from the mean to have large runs towards the mean. One example of a consistent run was from 1/30/2015 to 5/15/2015 in 3.5 months the base index, RSX, went up 39%. During the same time, RUSL went up 137%. Cubing would imply 167% increase, so not bad. Of course there is no guarantee that this will happen, but if it does, the investment will make a lot of money. But you are correct that if mean reversion takes a long time, leverage may be no better than the underlying index, and could even be negative returns.
Mean reversion plays generally have a timeline of years; I assumed that's what you were proposing. This should be obvious from the fact that you could have made the exact same mean reversion argument at the end of 2014 (2014's massive drops from the Ukraine crisis were when Russia arguably became undervalued according to your metrics), but actually RSX barely moved in 2015 as a whole. Sure if you cherry-pick the high in May 2015 you do well; hindsight-based cherry-picking always does well.
Over very short time frames (like <6 months), RUSS/RUSL are proba... (read more)