Buying International Shares

Should Australian's buy overseas shares as part of a balanced investment portfolio?

The Australian stock market is a very small portion of the overall investment universe - less than two percent, depending upon who you listen to. So today I'm going to explore why you might like to consider investing in international shares as well as a discussing some of the options.

The reason I started thinking about this was that I was recently reading about an investment concept known as asset allocation. The idea behind asset allocation is that you spread your investments across different assets classes with different risk profiles and for which returns are not always correlated. One of the asset classes suggested by many financial planners and other investment professionals is international shares.

Asset Allocation - Investing By The Numbers

What is asset allocation and how can it make you a better investor?

I've been reading a lot about asset allocation lately. I don't recall what prompted this sudden interest. Perhaps it's a factor of age. My investment strategy has always been heavily skewed towards Australian shares, for a number of reasons, but mainly because shares traditionally have a good return when compared to other asset classes and although they are more volatile, since retirement is still a fair way off, I was happy to accept the volatility in exchange for higher returns. However, while retirement is still a fair way off, it's still something which I need to take seriously as the recent fall in world stock markets would have been disastrous if I was about to retire.