The Morgan Stanley India Investment Fund

Back in early December I wrote a post about how closed end funds are the best way for small investors to invest in certain foreign markets such as Russia and India, countries for which no country-specific ETFs currently exist. I currently own the Templeton Russia closed-end fund (symbol: TRF) in my own personal account as well as in my hypothetical model portfolio. As I mentioned last week, TRF has performed extremely well for me and is already up around 20% so far in 2006.

I recently decided to see how the Morgan Stanley India Investment closed-end fund (symbol: IIF) has been doing and am amazed at how how well it has been performing. According to ETF connect, as of January 31, 2006 IIF has returned 86.69% for the past year, 76.76% annually over the past 3 years, 39.51% annually over the past 5 years and 22.08% annually over the past 10 years! $1000 invested in IIF 10 years ago would have grown to about $7350. Those returns are phenomenal. I wonder how well IIF will do over the next 10 years...