On August 20th I put up a post about Vietnam being in the middle of a stealth rally. Since then the stealthness has continued and, best as I can tell, it seems still that no one cares. I'll keep this short but not so sweet.  The light volume we are seeing on the market is a function of two things.  First is the topic all media is talking about - the end of summer and final vacations.  Yeah, yeah the week before Labor Day is traditionally light volume for that reason, but NOT this light! Earlier today on The Network they had a chap on (whom I seem to recall his being wrong a lot during this bear market) who suggested getting out of or reducing foreign equity exposure due in part to the recent rally in the dollar. Presumably he thinks this trend will continue. The call may or may not be right but it raises several dilemmas for investors. The issues include commission dollars spent, taxes (depending on the account type), where to invest the proceeds and the risk that the dollar rally is a short term snapback in a downtrend. Now what? For the last I don't know how many months a consensus seems to have built that once the Olympics ended the markets in China would drop. The logic being that after all the build up, the event is now over, the anticipation has ended and there would be an obvious let down. I heard this repeated many times. One small problem with the argument is that the Shanghai market had already dropped by about 60% by the time the Olympics started. Canada is a nice country - they don't make too much of a fuss and we tend to overlook them from time to time. But the iShares MSCI Canada has had a nice couple of weeks, up 2.2% in that timeframe. Canada is known for vast natural resources, too, and a return to commodities this week has helped push the fund up. Commodity producers and top holdings in the fund, such as Barrick Gold (3.2%) and Suncor Energy (4.3%), were feeling uplifted as a result. There have been several commentaries in the last few months about the energy carry trade, most recently today in the Financial Times. If you ever bought a second Jimmy Buffet disc (we've got four) you might recognize the title of this post. Key market bottoms are often very quiet, or at least happen without too much attention paid or credence given. One market I have been keen on for a couple of years now is Vietnam. The population is young (average age around 20), the country is big (about 70 million people), labor is cheaper than China, people want to work and they might even have a little oil. Part of the process for international investing is knowing when to reduce or avoid a country. But even if you are away from a country now, that does not mean you should not still keep tabs on what is going on because at some point you may want to go back in. Over the past few days a reader of my blog has left a couple of questions lamenting that a couple of commodity related things (more specifically an absolute return vehicle that uses commodities) has not done well in the last couple of weeks. People own things like commodities, foreign currencies, foreign stocks, absolute return, alternative strategies and the like for different reasons. Trading desks and hedge funds have plenty of cash on hand to pick each other's pockets. This is happened today in my opinion especially with financials which have become "trading" vehicles. After some days of decline it was time to squeeze whatever short sellers were bold enough to carry positions for more than a couple of days.