Asset Classes and Investment Vehicles
The Promise and Peril of Financial Products
While innovative financial products often entice investors with the promise of risk reduction or enhanced return, careful scrutiny of these strategies often reveals the potential benefits to be more than offset by increased complexity and higher costs.
Friday, August 27th, 2010
Foreign Exposure: How Much is Enough?
In a recent Wall Street Journal column, writer Jason Zweig addresses the oft-debated topic of the appropriate foreign allocation within a stock portfolio. Zweig concludes that, for most investors, their stock allocation should mirror the allocation of the world’s equity markets – which is to say 42% in the U.S. and 58% in foreign markets. While we find ourselves in agreement with Zweig on many issues, on this one we must respectfully disagree.
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010
High Growth, High Return?
Many investors are allocating increasingly larger percentages of their investment portfolio to emerging market stocks in hopes of capitalizing on the anticipated long-term economic growth of countries such as China, India and Brazil. But, while few argue with the rosy outlook for these economies, the intuitive assumption that robust economic growth must surely correlate with strong growth in stock prices simply does not hold.
