Checking the weather? Guess what—you’re using a model. While models can be useful for gaining insights that can help us make good decisions, they are inherently incomplete simplifications of reality.

In investing, factor models have been a frequent topic of discussion. Often marketed as smart beta strategies, these products are based on underlying models with limitations that many investors may not be aware of.

To help shed light on this concept, let’s start by examining an everyday example of a model: a weather forecast. Using data on current and past weather conditions, a meteorologist makes a number of assumptions and attempts to approximate what the weather will be in the future. This model may help you decide if you should bring an umbrella when you leave the house in the morning. However, as anyone who has been caught without an umbrella in an unexpected rain shower knows, reality often behaves differently than a model predicts it will.

Every day we enjoy the benefits of an interconnected world. We might start our day with a cup of coffee that originated in South America, check our email on a smartphone designed in California and manufactured in Taiwan, then shower and change into clothes woven from Egyptian fabrics before driving a German-made car or riding in a French-built train to work.

As consumers, we rarely think twice about the benefits of access to the cornucopia of goods the global market has to offer. Yet, as investors, we will often concentrate our portfolios in favor of our home market at the expense of global diversification. For example, while US stock markets represent just over 50% of the value of global equity markets, many US investors tend to allocate around 70% of their equity assets to domestic stocks.¹ This phenomenon, which can be observed across countries around the world, is known in the investment community as “home-country bias.” Given that certain frictions may be associated with investing abroad, a home-country bias may make sense for an investor in certain cases. For example, for tax-deferred investors in the US, foreign dividend tax withholdings may present a disadvantageous tax drag on international investments. In general, however, neglecting the benefits that global diversification has to offer may increase risks and decrease the investment opportunity set.

So you've crafted a plan for how you want your wealth, possessions and other assets to be distributed after you die. But what happens to your digital assets—online bank and investment accounts, social media profiles like Facebook and LinkedIn, and access to shopping sites like Amazon and eBay? This is a gray area with no definite rules for guidance. But it is possible to set up some common-sense directions to heirs that can help them manage the transfer of our digital presences along with our more tangible assets.  

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Focusing on what you can control can lead to a better investment experience.

Whether you’ve been investing for decades or are just getting started, at some point on your investment journey you’ll likely ask yourself some of the questions below. Trying to answer these questions may be intimidating, but know that you’re not alone. Your financial advisor is here to help. While this is not intended to be an exhaustive list it will hopefully shed light on a few key principles, using data and reasoning, that may help improve investors’ odds of investment success in the long run.

1. What sort of competition do I face as an investor?

The market is an effective information-processing machine. Millions of market participants buy and sell securities every day and the real-time information they bring helps set prices.  This means competition is stiff and trying to outguess market prices is difficult for anyone, even professional money managers (see question 2 for more on this). 

This is good news for investors though. Rather than basing an investment strategy on trying to find securities that are priced “incorrectly,” investors can instead rely on the information in market prices to help build their portfolios (see question 5 for more on this).