Dear reader,

Carsten Knop

Editor.

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I didn't get on really well with my flatmates in my old student flat-share in Münster. You coexisted in a way. Our worlds were so far apart that we could somehow endure it again. In any case, for many years it was not clear to me why the floor often smelled sweet. I always only perceived it subliminally because the anger that the bathroom was in a questionable state masked many other thoughts. Well. Meanwhile I know, sweet and rancid, that is not the typical Munster flat-share bathroom

smell

, but the

smell of Amsterdam

. There Thomas Gutschker, our political correspondent for the European Union and the Benelux countries, held his nose to the wind. After the last count it was

166 places where you don't go to have coffee, but to smoke a joint or buy a bag of hashish

. Many Dutch consider this a civil right and an expression of their freedom. Tourists are magically drawn to it. The bars market hippie folklore, they are a visible expression of the most liberal drug policy in Europe. But this idyll has become fragile.

Because over the past twenty years the Netherlands has become the

most important trading center for hard drugs in Europe and the largest production site for synthetic drugs in the world

. For years, gangs have been waging war against each other in a way that is otherwise only known from Mexico or Colombia: with assault rifles, hand grenades and bazookas. There are currently

two cases of contract killing going on

. One of them is about five murders in just eight months. In July, Peter R. de Vries, one of the country's best-known journalists, was shot dead in broad daylight on the street in the middle of Amsterdam.

Is that just a coincidence?

How nice it is sometimes to be young and naive. On the other hand, even at an advanced age, one is often frightened enough when one finds out something that one has never heard of before - but which one perhaps should or should have known. Reading closes these gaps, like the latest piece by our Tokyo correspondent Patrick Welter. Because from him we learn that there was

a major return movement in Japan at the beginning of the 1960s of people who wanted to live in their Korean homeland again

. He spoke to one of them. The problem: These returnees were sent to North Korea - and they fared badly there. After 43 years, Welter's interlocutor managed to escape.

I don't know if Norway is the opposite of North Korea, but in many ways it is. There is, for example, this sovereign wealth fund, which our

financial expert Volker Looman

dealt with. The fund was launched on January 1, 1998. During this time, he has

generated

an average annual return of 6.6 percent with the help of stocks, bonds and real estate

. Does that sound interesting? This is how you can replicate the fund:

The portfolio consists of 70 percent stocks, 25 percent bonds and 5 percent real estate.

You cannot buy the oil fund off the shelf, but if you like the composition, you can replicate the sovereign wealth fund with the help of three index funds.

So invest 70 percent of the money in the State Street MSCI All Country World (ISIN: IE00B44Z 5B48).

The fund consists of 2963 companies and costs 40 basis points per year.

For bonds, you can take the State Street Bloomberg Barclays 1-3 month index fund (ISIN: IE00BJXRT69 8), which contains 14 stocks and is available for 10 basis points.

Have fun reading and investing.

If you have any questions or suggestions about F +, your complete access to FAZ.NET, please write to me at c.knop@faz.de.

Your Carsten Knop


Editor of the


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung