This article is the third part of a study looking at global and domestic investing from the perspective of local investors.

In Part 1 and Part 2, we took the position of a local investor in one of 16 countries of interest, and we explored somewhat extreme positions of either investing 100% global or 100% domestic. It is now time to try a more balanced view of things, and study portfolios mixing global and domestic investments. We will notably look at the mitigation this could bring to the countries having fared the worst, but also consequences for countries having fared better. Of course, it is easy to look at such numbers in hindsight and draw hasty conclusions, so let’s keep in mind that nobody could have predicted winners and losers ahead of time.

Many North American investors tend to look carefully at historical returns in the US and in Canada, and draw various conclusions. Occasionally, some references are made to Japan and the UK, and few people look any further. The world changes though. The UK was undoubtedly the world economic leader at the end of the 19th Century, while the US clearly dominates nowadays. Japan was on a roll, had a bigger market capitalization than the US in the 80s, and yet badly faltered since then. The world changes in ways we cannot predict, and it would be naive to assume that several decades from now, the situation will be similar to today’s environment. One thing we can do to get some perspective, is to try to draw some analogies with what happened in a larger sample of countries.

This article focuses on the historical returns from 16 developed countries, looking from the perspective of a local investor, and assuming a strong home country bias to begin with (i.e. solely using domestic stocks and domestic bonds). We will look at more diversified portfolios mixing domestic and global investments in Part 3.