Advertisement for MMM-1994 in 'Izvestia', which just turned exactly 32 years old yesterday.

I was 7 years old back then, and I vividly remember how Lenya Golubkov smiled from every TV screen in every Russian apartment, promising first boots for his wife, then a car, and later — an apartment and a house.

I don't want to draw historical parallels, but lately our stock market somewhat resembles MMM. The schemes of 'relatively honest extraction of money from citizens' seem to have been adopted by certain major shareholders of public companies, as well as a number of bond issuers.

💁‍♂️Old man Mavrodi would surely recognize the traits of his brainchild in some of the events happening on the exchange, if he were still around today.

VTB with its constant additional issuances and dilution of current shareholders' stakes. Investors who believed in the 'People's IPO' in 2008 and invested in VTB shares have now lost over 87% of their money. And that's just nominally, not accounting for the crazy inflation.

📉Most of the IPOs in recent years: Diasoft, Astra, VseInstrumenty, KarMani, Jetland… They all hit the market with powerful advertising PR campaigns, promising growth rates of almost 30%+ per year, backed by 'objective' assessments from bank analysts about supposedly fair or even undervalued prices.

The end result can be seen on the trading terminal screens by the 'happy' participants of these and some other IPOs. As they say, 'Well, I just couldn't do it, couldn't do it.' ©

There's a lot to say about bond issuers too. Russian Shoes (they really pulled a fast one on everyone, including me), Garant-Invest, Monopolya, SibAvtoTrans, Veratek, Royal Capital… The list goes on, and we have new potentially problematic cases on the horizon. Right now, we're keeping an eye on the debt pyramid of Eurotrans and Oil Resource.

🦥 Nevertheless, I continue to invest my hard-earned cash into the domestic economy, hoping that our big business won't end up like the legendary pyramid of the mid-90s. I have a feeling that things are going to get even crazier, comrades 😎 As they say, We Can Do A Lot.

We're crying, we're poking, we're eating cactus.