Best Shares To Buy In 2010

Buying shares over the past couple of years has certainly been a hair-raising experience for most of us. It's been an extraordinary roller coaster ride. The All Ordinaries index started 2008 at 4,882 before reaching a low of 3201 in November of that year. Then in March of 2009 we got lower still - down to 3,090 in March before finishing the year at 4,882. Overall in 2009 the index gained more than 33% or around 58% since the low point in March but that was a shocker of a year in 2008.

2008/2009 Share Price Graph

So what can we expect from the Australian stock market in 2010? Well quite frankly, your guess is as good as mine. But I think it's worth putting what we learned in 2008 and 2009 into practice in 2010.

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.