Foreign Investment Ideas
To investors interested in Eastern Europe, Germany looks like a fountain of profit. West Germany is about to engage in the massive, risky- but undoubtedly rewarding- enterprise of bringing East Germany into the modern world. Its efforts will reach into other post-communist countries, too.</br></br>For individuals, profit-hunting in places like Hungary and Czechoslovakia is simply too chancy. Your best shot will lie in West Germany, whose growth is expected to be electric, and in European companies that have major businesses in Germany. Austria is another thought: It is the major staging area for investing in Czechoslovakia.</br></br>For a dollar investor, German stocks are up about 31 percent since the first breach in the Berlin Wall. In early February, however, the German market started to drop and, recently, the deutsche mark also turned down. For now, there's a general belief that those two markets have further to fall.</br></br>That means that German stocks and deutsche marks may soon be a buy again. Alternatively, consider the general European mutual funds, which, after the economic union of 1992, stand to profit from the growth in business across the continent.</br></br>American Depository Receipts (ADRs) for West German companies. ADRs represent foreign issues. They trade on the U.S. stock exchanges, or off the exchanges in the pink sheets. But they're often too pricey for individuals: around $198 a share for Mannesmann, a construction company, and $86 for Siemens, a leader in electronics. John Dessauer of Dessauer's Journal of Financial Markets recommends both.