Most investors don’t typically get the opportunity to emulate the strategies of the world’s biggest asset managers. The recent announcement that the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund, the world’s biggest with $1.1-trillion, wants to increase its allocation to North American stocks should be a wake-up call for equity holders who ignore overseas shares — with investors from one nation in particular needing to pay attention.
The UK investment industry manages about £8.5-trillion, more than three quarters of which is on behalf of local customers, according to figures compiled by the Investment Association, a trade body. For the past five years, the geographical asset allocation of the group has barely budged, and domestic holdings have remained stuck at about 30%, compared with 23% in Europe and 22% or less in North America.
The big winners have been US stocks, driven by outsized gains in the values of the region’s biggest technology companies in recent years. Hence the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund’s announcement a few weeks ago that it’s been missing out by not having enough of its money in the US market, and intends to shift 6.5% of its equity portfolio — more than $50bn — to North American stocks.
On an annualised basis, that works out at a bit more than 3% for the UK market since 2015, below the 13% a year that US stocks have delivered or the 10.4% available from the global stock market index. Investing at home has been a costly bias for UK savers.
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