….to all of you who wished me well during my unexpected urgent medical episode.
I am now recuperating from a microdiscectomy operation which has relieved the disabling pressure on the nerve root feeding my right leg. I am not yet allowed to sit, apparently because that puts the most pressure on te lumbar spine, but am slowly increasing my walking to restore my atrophied leg muscles which thought they were redundant after 3 weeks when any attempt to use the ones on the right generated too much pain! I am writing this with the PC on a high chest of drawers! Typos may exceed the usual quota as I am not hooked into a large screen!
An aside
Immediately after I published my article suggesting that diversification was more tricky than just working through five continents and picking the largest markets, we had a really quite major set back in South Korea.
Looking at a graph on the KOSPI index and you will see a classic reversion to mean that has maybe not yet seen enough of an overshoot into the negative, plus we know that this was a market where a really large numbers of maybe ‘green’ investors had been chasing the semi-conductor story with borrowed money, so in itself not really an unusual event.
Why I mention it is that one might be owning a fund (I am) with a known South Korean bias and not fully appreciated (I did) that its excellent performance was driven by only two factors: sector focus (tech) and momentum. So any diversification based on geography and potential differences between say UK and the South Korean long term economic prospects, economic mix etc were, in the near term, totally eliminated by the factor elements of the fund porfolio composition. Of course, not all Asia Pacific funds would heve been concentrated in that way, but if the one you own was, it might be something you had not spotted!
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