I have been participating a quarterly series at BusinessWeek the past year, titled Where to Invest $10,000 Right Now. Its an outstanding collection of 5 investors: Joe Brennan global head of Vanguard’s Equity Index Group, Russ Koesterich Portfolio manager, BlackRock Global Allocation Fund, Sarah Ketterer Chief executive officer and fund manager, Causeway Capital Management, Richard Bernstein Chief executive officer, chief investment officer, Richard Bernstein Advisors, and myself.
Normally, I am not a fan of blindly providing investment advice in the mass media beyond informing people what is really going on. Readers come from all over the world, have different risk tolerances, live under differing tax regimes, have different incomes and financial goals. No one speaking in public knows what their readers need to retire. Anything any pundit says publicly cannot possibly apply to everyone.
Thus, it is tricky to provide advice that wasn’t self-serving or even irresponsible.
The way I managed around this was to identify several investing themes that were: a) relatively inexpensive; b) under-invested by American readers; c) could see price appreciation as well as be a long term asset allocation hold; d) are all represented in our clients’ asset allocation portfolios.
My first suggestion a year ago was Buy Emerging Markets. They were both cheap, and widely underrepresented in American portfolios. The next quarter were European equities, also cheaper than U.S. stocks and wildly out of favor. And in the process of the two of these, I managed to sneak in small lesson about home country bias.
This go round, I recommended Large Cap US Value:
Go read the entire thing here.
And if you want or need help with your own portfolios, please reach put to us — go to our website, or call us at 212-455-9122 (ask for Erika or Kris), or send an email to Info-at-RitholtzWealth-dot-com.
