My daughter’s financial future is in jeopardy. I blame Croatia. And England. (And Brazil and Germany and…)

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‘In football, everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.’
Jean-Paul Sartre

Кто не рискует, тот не пьет шампанского.
(‘If you don’t risk, you don’t drink champagne.’)

I love blaming others. Especially when it’s not my fault. I won’t hesitate to throw people under the bus. Does this make me a bad person? Probably.

So, even though I decided at the start of the World Cup that I was going to let fate determine how I would invest for my daughter’s future – I mean, that’s not a terribly irresponsible thing to do at all! – I am still not going to take responsibility for coming up with such an absurd idea. It’s not my fault – simply, the wrong teams made it to the semifinals and then the final. How was I to know?

(This is a follow-on from my last post. If you haven’t yet read that, then the following will probably make little to no sense. Unlike most of my posts, which make perfect sense and are always clear, logical and easy to follow.)

I won’t get into too many intricate details and the minutiae of my investing strategy. But when I thought about the teams most likely to make it to the last four of the World Cup – the likes of France, Germany, Spain, Belgium, Brazil and Argentina – I was pretty much happy with the type of investment opportunity it would provide (some high-risk/high-reward along with more staid, solid and stable European value). I never figured England – and the uncertainty of Brexit and what that entails for the economy - or Croatia would get this far. If my daughter’s nest egg when she turns 18 amounts to nothing, then it’s all those countries’ faults. Not mine.

And so, based on my original ‘plan’, I should thus be investing:

$500 each into Belgium and England
$1000 each into France and Croatia

I mentioned the possibility of my little girl’s financial well-being depending on ‘English ale brewers’. Now we can add Belgian diamond merchants, French cheese producers and…Croatian land mine exporters? I consider myself pretty well-rounded and well-read, and I’d like to think I know a thing or two about what’s going on in the world, but damned if I know what the hell Croatia is well-known for product-wise on the international market. What the hell do they produce? Last week I bought a tin of Croatian tuna, so do I go out and buy $1000 worth of that and hope that it serves as an investment into a lifetime of good health and omega 3 oils for her heart?

As I discussed in my last post, I never came to a final decision as to whether I’d invest in a team’s…I mean, a country’s overall stock market or a segment of it (a market index), or a company that’s representative or iconic of that country…in other words, when you think ‘England’ or ‘France’, what’s the first company that comes to mind? Rolls-Royce? Tesco? BP? HSBC? Louis Vuitton? Chanel? BNP Paribas? Which one to choose?

When it comes to Belgium, I think beer. And diamonds. But the problem with beer is that it would mean investing in mega-conglomerate Anheuser-Busch InBev or in other words, Budweiser. It makes up nearly 25% of the Belgian stock market index, so that would be the most obvious, logical choice. But Budweiser, really? All of that incredible Belgian beer, perhaps the world’s finest, and I’m putting my hard-earned cash into Bud? In fact, when I look through the entire Belgian stock market index, they are the only company I’ve even heard of. I guess I could really throw caution to the wind – or rather, my daughter’s future cash – and buy $500 worth of GIMV INVESTERINGSMAATSCHAPPIJ VOOR or AANNEMINGSMAATSCHAPPIJ CFE NV. Yes, really.

As for Croatia…well, there’s a major problem with this one. Unless I’m looking in the wrong places, I can’t find a single Croatian company listed on any stock exchange anywhere outside of Croatia. In other words, it appears impossible to invest in a Croatian company unless you actually live in Croatia. If I want to buy the CROBEX (trust me on this), I would actually need to find someone in Croatia to buy it for me.

So what to do? Scrap the whole idea?

I’m stuck on this one. I could go double or nothing and wait to see if France win, and then put everything into France. But if Croatia somehow pull it off in the final and win it all…well, then my dear little daughter will have a lifetime of Croatian tuna to get through. Unless I can think of a better idea in the next 24-48 hours.

Anyone?

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