Stock markets usually go up. Sometimes, they leave.

One fact of financial life that most investors have forgotten is that markets are not always liquid or constant. They can dry up, or even die.

Of course, the Federal Reserve and other central banks have flooded investors with cheap money for more than a decade. So it is easy to imagine that government policy will always move the markets. Sometimes, it destroys them.

War is usually the culprit.

According to William Goetzman, a finance professor at Yale University and Philip Jorian of the University of California, Irvine, trading in major markets outside the US was halted for months or years at least 25 times in the 20th century. (Those halvings, often associated with severe losses, do not count the New York Stock Exchange, which closed in July 1914 to stem panic from the outbreak of World War I and did not reopen until that December. )

Many investors believe that the markets are permanent and that profits are ensured if you only hold stocks for long periods of time. Earlier generations in Argentina, Chile, Egypt, Germany, Greece, Japan, Portugal and Spain learned that governments could shut down markets and keep them closed for longer periods of time.

That’s why diversification is so important. According to MSCI, as of December 31, Russia accounted for less than 0.5% of total global share-market capitalization and less than 4% of total emerging-market value.

Even if you went all-out on Russia ETFs, you were still able to get out at the price, at least for a while. On Friday morning, however, the NYSE Arca exchange halted trading in iShares MSCI Russia, Franklin FTSE Russia and Direxion Daily Russia Bull 2X shares. Direxion Fund has already announced that it will expire on March 18. Trading in the other two available ETFs, VanEck Russia and VanEck Russia Small-Cap, can also be intercepted by CBOE Global Markets.

“Governments are imposing sanctions and the market is near zero, there’s really no room for retail investors to trade Russian securities,” says Reginald Brown, head of ETF trading at market-making company GTS in New York.

“You can’t sell because you can’t trade,” says Dave Nadig, an analyst at ETF Trends. “For all practical purposes, these securities no longer exist.”

In theory, the Russia ETF could pause to reopen trading in Moscow. It would be a two-part gamble: Russia would have to respect its property rights and Russian shares would have to retain some value at the time. Industry analysts say that instead of rolling those dice, the fund is likely to be liquidated and send back whatever cash is left to investors.

Is there any chance that bets on Russian stocks might pay off someday?

Well, the odds aren’t exactly zero, but history can have a habit of hurting people when it repeats itself.

In 1911, a French economist, Alfred Neymark, estimated that Russia was the fifth largest investment center in the world, comprising 5% of the global market for stocks and bonds.

In 1914 more than 200 Russian companies were listed on the St. Petersburg Stock Exchange. Amid the ravages of World War I, it closed that year, re-opening for two months in 1917. It closed again after the Bolsheviks overthrew the Tsar.

Trade did not resume for another three-quarters of a century.

The market has frozen again inside Russia.

Some Russian companies are listed on other markets. US stock rights of Gazprom PJSC, the Russian energy titan, closed at $1.10 over the counter in New York on Thursday, down from $8.97 on February 16. That price was 0.51 times earnings per share over the past four quarters, according to FactSet. Sberbank Russia PJSC closed at 52 cents in the US on Thursday, down from $14.76 on February 16. This is less than .2 times its earnings in the last 12 months.

Those are not typos: they are price/earnings ratios below 1.0. Shares of companies generally trade at prices that are multiples of their earnings. The earnings of Russian companies are now a multiple of their share price.

All of this puts Russian President Vladimir Putin in position to pull off one of the biggest and most brutal tradeoffs in investment history: With the market capped for Russian stocks, he could nationalize every major company in the country for kopecks. Was. on the ruble.

In May 1991, when it officially opened for business, the chairman of the Leningrad Stock Exchange told The Wall Street Journal that he could see two futures for stock trading in Russia.

One, Igor Klyuchnikov said, was that the Russian market would become the largest market in the world.

Other? “I also have a pessimistic view: that we will return to the old distribution system – maybe they will call it a market system, but it will be old – and in this case, I have no need for our stock exchange.”

Years later, his first vision came true. Now there may be another.