new york march 2 reuters  the battered shares of van eck’s russia etf rsxz are attracting a surge of interest from traders and drawing comparisons to last year’s frenzy in socalled meme stocks designed to track the performance of the mvis russia index mvrsxtr the etf has tumbled 65 over the last two weeks as russia’s invasion of ukraine and western sanctions stir massive gyrations in assets linked to the country its sharp decline has ramped up trading in the etfs shares and options much of it driven by retail investors analysts said with the etf’s price swinging wildly  it fell as much as 15 before recovering to trade up as high as 6 on the day  trading volume in the etf shares jumped to 27 million by 230 pm 1930 gmt or about twice the average daily amount according to trade alert data options on the etf were even busier with 211000 contracts traded or four times the expected volume garrett desimone head quant at optionmetrics said some of the volume seemed spurred by traders trying to profit from the extremely elevated volatility in the stock these high levels of volatility are extraordinary causing the vaneck russia etf to behave similarly to a meme stock he said it looks as though retail definitely has its fingerprints on rsx options trades today desimone said sentiment was mixed with some traders betting on a quick rebound while others were hoping for a continued slump in the shares based on the choice of options contracts traded russian markets being closed for the third straight day posed another challenge to valuing the etf correctly causing the trading price to stray far from its net asset value nav  or the value of each share of the etf based on its portion of the funds underlying assets analysts said on monday the etfs shares finished the day at a 178 premium to its nav according to vaneck data that makes the trading in the shares that much more speculative said todd rosenbluth head of etf and mutual fund research at cfra research reporting by saqib iqbal ahmed editing by ira iosebashvili and jonathan oatis