CIARAN RYAN: How much should you invest offshore? Investing abroad is not only about looking at different asset classes and securities beyond your home turf, or gaining exposure to a wider universe of opportunities. Those who have a poor view of South Africa’s future will be inclined to take a good chunk of their wealth offshore, but how much you invest offshore is a complex question with many parts.
But from a local investor’s perspective, what we’ve seen in our unit trust industry is that flows have really gone into two places – either in more conservative investments like cash deposits, or money market funds. In the fixed-income space, obviously investments are often taxed at marginal income rates as opposed to capital gain rates.
So to say that you think the prospects are better on nominal terms might be true, but on an after-tax basis it might actually be untrue. But we know, for example, that the dollar is incredibly strong at the moment. We know that US markets are incredibly concentrated into a big portion in highly valued companies, as in valuation being excessive, which obviously means potential downside on the prices of those securities.
That being said, although asset managers do add a lot more science and research to finding out the right combination of assets, they’re thinking about portfolio construction – what the optimal blend, given the interaction between different asset classes. What’s your advice to investors who have that uncertainty as to what to do, but would still like to invest abroad?
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