A Nigerian prince approaches you about a lucrative financial opportunity...or investing in Africa.

Members present: Brian, Bickford, and Danak

We started talking about EWZ, which has been the bane of our portfolio for some time now. Is it time to get out? If not now, when, and why?

Next, we decided it was high time to compare some potential investments in Africa. The table below outlines some of the pros, cons, and mysteries of a few prominent Africa ETFs. Most of the information from this was gathered from Morningstar as well as the holdings pages from the various funds themselves.

Fund	Pros	Cons	Good/Bad?
EZA	·      Mostly Africa ·      Heavy consumer discretionary ·      Good expense ratio	·      Heavy in financials ·      Low diversification of holdings
GAF	·      See above	·      Only slightly more diversified than EZA
AFK	·      Good expense ratio ·      Good diversification in both holdings and countries	·      47% financials ·      13% energy
NAFAX	·      17% Industrials ·      14% Consumer Cyclical (These are sectors we don’t have a lot of)	·      Heavy in financials (23%) ·      High expense ratio (2.5%)	10% of the fund is Nigerian Treasury Bonds.
WAFMX	·      Good diversification in holdings ·      50% Consumer Defensive (staples) ·      20% Consumer Cyclical	·      High expense ratio (2.25%)
CAFRX		·      Really strange, with lots of moving parts. See next column	·      Two different indexes in its top holdings. (EZA as 18%, AFK as 14%)
EGPT	·      Diversified well by company ·      Not super-heavy in Communications (17%) and Financials (15%)	·      Egypt may be a volatile state to invest in	·      58% of the fund is small companies
MES		·      46% Financials
GULF		·      High in Financials and Communications

Looking at this, there are reasons to not invest in all of these. However, we didn't do this sort of pro/con analysis for our previous investments. NORW was 50% Energy, but we ended up using to balance our portfolio. Right now, we want to avoid going too heavy in Telecom.

For next week:

• Do we try to balance our portfolio, or do we try to get into Africa? 
• It might be nice if our portfolio was eventually less than 20% in anything. 

Profit!