CREDIBILITY FOR EMERGING MARKETS

The squeakiest wheel in your financial life is probably your investments: your portfolio and how its faring. The attention paid it is significantly more than the five other traditional areas of financial planning.

That’s driven in part by an abundance of information, media speculation, comparative performance, and the desire to put your earnings to good use for good things. Nothing wrong with that.

Because your life is so much more than the aggregate success of these six areas, we use a lot of digital ink asking people to live their lives while they can and make the best choices possible for the future, without obsessing over the unknowns.

As a result, our investment philosophy reads differently than some: we don’t time markets (because it doesn’t work well); we don’t panic when markets get scary, and we certainly don’t listen to the finance media.

We also don’t write technical market pieces very often. Today, we meet halfway with technical market information that we didn’t write.

Dimensional Fund Advisors offers this one-minute read about an asset class we often find ourselves explaining, emerging markets. These are securities invested in developing economies.

If you’re a client, emerging markets are part of your allocation. If that makes you nervous, I hope their insights quell some of those concerns.

This chart (lifted directly from DFA’s blog, with their permission) shows emerging markets taking the top performer spot tag-team style with its developed market counterpart over a considerable time horizon.

Certainly, some food for thought.