Posts Tagged ‘international investing’

I have to question the need for the wide variety of international country index funds. The AssetCorrelation website has an excellet correlation matrix which covers exchange-traded index funds from various countries around the world.

Take a careful look at the matrix for the various countries. Other than Brazil and Israel (with correlations of 0.73 and 0.35 respectively versus the S&P 500) the rest of the countries’ index funds are all tracking the S&P 500 with >0.90x correlation coefficients.

It might be that the time period is only 90 trading days (about 4 months) and this represents a time in the market which has seen a greater herd mentality than usual. Or it might be that global inflation fears do justify a simultaneous downward revision in global equity asset prices. Either way, lately it has been hard to see the benefits of international equity exposure. Even emerging markets like Turkey, Mexico and Chile have been strongly correlated recently. Inflation really is the great leveller.