JoeBailey3

One of the most basic questions of investing is what percentage of one’s assets should be invested in international stocks. Investing in international stocks has two potential advantages, lower volatility and higher long term returns, but neither is certain and the opposite could occur. Over the next couple posts we’ll look at both of these potential benefits, attempt to evaluate the risks and develop some heuristics for making wise asset allocation decisions. The idea that international diversification has lowered volatility is a central concept of Modern Portfolio Theory and is well supported by a number of studies. This is because, over the periods tested, although international markets underperformed the US stock market they tended to zig when the US zagged and therefore a combination of US and international stocks yielded a higher total return on investment with lower volatility. However, most of these studies focused on 30 or 40 year periods in the mid to late 20th c...

     In the United States we have a representative democracy. The president is chosen by the people and therefore has a popular mandate to rule and reign, or something like that.      This little chart shows the number of votes received in the primary election by each president that was not an incumbent since 1912. Because most voters will only vote for one of the two major party nominees the primary is actually more important in selecting the president than the general election. As you can see a pretty small percentage of the population actually gets the president they wanted from the beginning.       I only looked at years where an incumbent was not running or did not win. The extremely low percentages at the beginning of the time period are due, I believe, to the fact that primary voting was not wide spread until much later in the century, but I am by no means an expert on the history of elections. I also used total population which ...