The Advantages of International Portfolio Diversification
1. Spreading risk: Correlations between national asset markets
Because of risk aversion, investors demand higher expected returns for taking on investments
with greater risk. It is a well-established proposition in portfolio theory that whenever there is
imperfect co-relation between different assets’ returns, risk is reduced by maintaining only a
portion of wealth in any individual asset. More generally, by selecting a portfolio according to
expected returns, variances of returns, and co-relations between returns, an investor can achieve
minimum risk for a given expected portfolio return, or maximum expected portfolio return for a
given risk. Furthermore, ceteris paribus, the lower are the co-relations between returns on
different assets, the greater are the benefits of portfolio diversification.
International Journal of Marketing, Financial Services & Management