Sometimes the best places to invest are in the scariest assets that have experienced the largest declines. Historically bear market declines are followed by bull markets. The greater the market crash, the greater the market recovery that follows it usually is. This is what David Dreman called investor overaction, when the economy is growing investors bid up equity prices too high, and when the economy is sour and the future is uncertain the market overreacts on the down side. This phenomena occurs in all asset classes, however stocks are the most affected since they are more volatile than must other assets classes. This phenomena is not unique to the United States, numerous studies have confirmed that foreign Investors overreact as much as American investors. For example the Russian stock maket declined about 83% from its peak in May 2008 until February 2009. This made Russia one of the worst performing equity markets during that time period. However since February the Russian Stock market has gone up 173% making it one of the best performing equity markets.

I only included countries that had an ETF that I could obtain sufficient information about. Iceland to my knowledge would make the list since it had a huge stock market decline and has probably been the country most affected by the global financial crisis. Iceland had a massive one day drop of 76% in October 2008 alone!, however there is no Iceland ETF and I therefore did not include Iceland in my table below. Ireland has an ETF symbol IQE, however I could not locate sufficient data on the ETF and therefore had to omit it from the chart below. Therefore I only included the countries that had ETFs I could obtain information on. I did not include any regional ETFs (ie Latin America) I focused exclusively on country ETFs.