Russia-Ukraine: How the top stock and bond funds exposed to Russia are performing

Yahoo Finance's Jared Blikre breaks down how Russian stocks are trading at Monday's market open.

Video transcript

BRIAN CHEUNG: Investors cautious about their exposure to Russia might want to check their portfolio for a stock and bond funds that might be exposed. Yahoo Finance's Jared Blikre is here with the update on how some of those Russia-- exposed securities are performing. Jared, any update on what's been going on, especially now that we're crossing into our third, fourth week of the conflict in Ukraine?

JARED BLIKRE: Yeah, you bet, Brian. And first of all, most people are not going to have a lot of exposure to Russian securities or bonds, just because that's kind of a fringe part of the portfolio. Emerging markets, you might have a percentage of that allocated to it and only a fraction of that allocated to Russia. But really interesting to plot what's going on in these markets. I have our Russia heat map on the YFi Interactive. And by the way, options expiration, which we just had last Friday-- and it was a big one-- that plays a part, too.

So let me start with the MOEX. This is the Russian stock index, their benchmark index. And you'll see that this stopped trading in late February. So we had that big down day, cut off from US securities by sanctions. Actually, they also froze their own stock market. And you take a look at some of the bigger names. Here is Yandex, probably the biggest, most popular stock to trade in the US based on Russia ADRs. And you can see that stopped trading around the same time.

Now, I mentioned options expiration. This was kind of a mess Friday because the VanEck Vectors Russia ETF, that stopped trading in early March. But if you were still betting on the bearish action, you could have sold some calls or bought some puts. This was an issue last Friday when a lot of people did not know that automatic-- or excuse me, automatic-- and the phrase is not coming to my mind right now, but automatic execution for those expiring options was on, off. So a lot of confusion here.

But like I said, the average investor not really having a lot of exposure to Russia. Some of the funds where you might find yourself-- so here's one. This is a dividend fund, iShares Emerging Markets Dividend, you can see that's still trading. They do have some Russian exposure, but not a whole lot. What happens with these Russian stocks? They're going to be very difficult to value. Are you going to be able to get certificates for the underlying? Is there going to be a cash payout? I think a lot of these things are still in flux right now.

But nevertheless, it's not only the Russian stocks and Russian markets that have been going kind of haywire. It's also futures in the US. And only today, I want to show everybody, this is a wheat chart. This is a year to date chart. This doesn't look like a huge volatile day. This is up 7%. But that's basically the exchange limit. And we hit that close to the open. We've come up a little bit, so it's still trading under that exchange limit. But as we've seen many times in the past with these futures, we can see that hit both to the downside and the upside, sometimes on the same day.

So in as much as some people might have exposure to food stocks or also to, let's say, ETFs that govern wheat or soybeans or different crops, could have some exposure there. But I think the biggest exposure that we're all facing right now is just in general, what's happening with inflation. And we know that price inflation was a huge deal coming into the crisis. And now because of the additional supply chain disruptions, Russia being a huge exporter of a lot of those commodities, the breadbasket of Europe, all of this shaping up to be a very important event for investors that we need to keep tabs on.

So I don't think the food prices are abating. I think that this is just another surge in the upward direction right now that we're seeing for commodities after a brief pullback. But we'll have to see. All this means there's a lot more volatility in investors' portfolios, Brian.

BRIAN CHEUNG: Auto exercise, was that the options terms you were looking for?

JARED BLIKRE: Thank you.

BRIAN CHEUNG: I got you.

JARED BLIKRE: Thank you for that.

BRIAN CHEUNG: I got you, man. See, that's why we're a good team. Yahoo Finance's Jared Blikre, thanks so much for the breakdown on that front.