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By Bloomberg

When Russia’s currency depreciation bottomed on Jan. 30, one investor announced it was loading up on rubles to the tune of $7.9 billion. Now, after the world’s biggest rally, that same investor is selling.

The investor? Russia. Deputy Finance Minister Alexey Moiseev said on Tuesday the ruble is “very strong” and the ministry has started buying foreign currencies.

“It was a brilliant call,” said Piotr Matys, a London- based foreign-exchange strategist at Rabobank, which ranked among the five most accurate ruble forecasters in the past four quarters in Bloomberg data. “With the ruble rally running out of steam and prospects of further gains limited by orchestrated efforts from the Bank of Russia and the Finance Ministry, investors may start looking for better opportunities in the emerging-markets universe.”

The ruble’s 40 percent surge from a low at the end of January has hit resistance at about 49 rubles against the greenback as verbal interventions by policy makers in April gave way to the central bank buying dollars. Given the timing of the Finance Ministry’s purchases exactly as the ruble bottomed in January, some analysts say they’re taking more notice of the ministry’s strategy.

Verbal Interventions

On Jan. 20, Moiseev said Russia would buy as much as 500 billion rubles by the end of the month using cash from its Reserve Fund. Assuming it acquired the full amount in dollars, those rubles are now worth $10.1 billion, or $2.2 billion more than they were back then, based on the average exchange rate for the purchases provided by the Finance Ministry on Tuesday. The ministry also sold euros and pounds, it said.

“The Finance Ministry is the best foreign-exchange dealer of 2014-2015,” Sergey Romanchuk, the head of foreign-currency trading at Metallinvestbank in Moscow, said in e-mailed comments. “They have the chance to be right again.”

By lending the rubles it bought to banks, the ministry earned 14 billion rubles ($282 million) in the period, according to an e-mailed statement from its press service. It didn’t confirm the total amount of rubles acquired.

The ministry’s purchases won’t affect the exchange rate because they happen off-market and are conducted directly with the Bank of Russia, according to a statement from the central bank. The aim is to capitalize on the ruble’s strength to store dollars for future needs, like external debt payments, the deputy minister said Tuesday.

Best Trader

The ruble fell 0.2 percent to 49.6830 by 10:18 a.m. in Moscow as the deputy minister’s remarks fueled bets against the currency just days after the central bank started buying $100 million to $200 million per day to replenish reserves.

Speculating on the currency’s future course probably wasn’t the ministry’s aim: It bought the rubles to help cover what analysts project will be the widest budget deficit as a percentage of economic output since 2010.

“I call this luck,” Konstantin Artemov, a money manager at Raiffeisen Capital in Moscow, said in e-mailed comments. “They weren’t making a trade.”

The ruble had lost almost half of its value in the 12 months through Jan. 30, when world’s worst currency collapse in the period bottomed out. Since then, oil prices climbed and pro- Russian rebels sealed a cease-fire deal with Ukraine in February, bringing a shaky truce to the war in the nation’s east.

The ministry’s plan to sell the local currency now “sends the message that a stronger ruble is not desired at this juncture.