Got myself into a mess with the Turkish KUYAS stock. Haven’t been able to sell it for weeks now. There’s just no liquidity in the market – that’s it, taban.

It looked like a good stock, been going up for years, everything seemed to be okay. So I added it to the portfolio. It went up for me for a while too, then suddenly dropped like a rock. I’m down about 70% on the position now, and probably around 14% on the whole portfolio.

The worst part is, I can’t sell it. The sell queue in the order book is around 16 mil shares, roughly 90 times the daily trading volume (150–200k). Apparently we’ve still got a long way to fall – looks like all the way to zero.

The Turks call the lower daily price limit taban. The upper one is tavan. Depending on the type of stock, the daily range can be anywhere from ±10% to ±20%. KUYAS just opens 10% lower every day and closes right there.

It bounced a little recently. Thought that was the bottom. Nope. Down we go.

What exactly happened there and where all the bulls disappeared to, I still don’t really know. Some murky story involving manipulation, arrests, big blocks of stock changing hands. At this point, frankly, I don’t even care anymore.

The only thing I’m curious about now is whether I’ll get any liquidity at all, or whether I’ll just sit there helplessly watching the share price mathematically approach zero.

That’s investing in exotic markets for you.