Remember the day trader mania that we experienced here in the United States when the Internet and tech bubbles hit back in 2000? Remember the Chinese stock market bubble and the enormous amount of day traders there were in 2007?

Well, now there’s a new day trader playground. This time, it’s in Russia.

Last year was tough on the entire world, but it was actually one of the toughest years on Russia’s stocks and on Russia’s currency, the ruble. Both crashed hard last year as the global economy was still falling off the map, and as natural resources did the same.

However, now Russia’s largest stock exchange, the Micex, trades at an average of eight times earnings against the MSCI Emerging Market Index’s 18 times earnings, China’s 32 times earnings, Brazil’s 24 times earnings, or even India’s 18 times earnings.

So, the deep values that are perceived there are drawing traders out of the woodworks right now.

The retail trading volume on the Micex has surged sixfold this year. In fact, the number of Russian individual trading accounts has grown to over 630,000 as of July. These accounts generate about $1.3 billion in average daily volume, up from $220 million as recently as January.

This added volume is drawing the eyes of big institutions all over the world, like BlackRock and Templeton. If you’re a big fish in the sea like these guys are, you need a ton of volume in play in order to be able to move in and out of their stocks without significantly moving the market on yourself.

You or I don’t have to worry about this, but an institutional money manager who moves in and out of millions of shares has to consider this a lot. It limits where they can effectively invest. That’s one of the reasons why they like the currency market so much.

In fact, in one emerging market BlackRock fund, they’re moving $1.4 trillion around.

In addition to the volume, the huge volatility has investors salivating too. Russia’s Micex has surged 79 percent this year which is the steepest gain of any of the indexes that track the world’s 30 biggest markets.

Needless to say, all of this focus and attention on Russia’s stocks is also pushing its ruble around too.

The dollar has been dropping broadly against most currencies since March, and it has done the same against the ruble. However, not only have excesses been wrung out of the USD/RUB currency pair uptrend, but as recently as May, the ruble has pushed the USD/RUB into a downtrend that is still just getting started.

So currency traders, too, are joining the party by pushing the ruble higher vs. the dollar while all of this mania exists.

As this trend spreads, more foreigners will come and join in on the party. That will cause the ruble to gain further as these foreign traders have to exchange their foreign currencies for rubles in order to trade stocks denominated in rubles.

Expect the ruble to continue to gain strength as the world markets heal, global GDP numbers start to expand once again, and as energy resources like oil are used to grow these recovering economies once again.