The Flexible Investing Playbook - Asset Allocation Strategies for Long-Term Success

Countless foreign stocks routinely outperform the S&P 500, but sending your money halfway around the world can feel risky -- unless you know which stocks to invest in. How can you make informed decisions on the international market? How can you find the Microsoft of Germany or Wal-Mart of France? What stocks should you buy in emerging markets such as Asia and Latin America? The Top 100 International Growth Stocks highlights the best opportunities for creating a diversified portfolio of stable, quality investments. Here are:

• Detailed company profiles of 100 overseas performers
• Invaluable ³grading boxes² that rate growth, management quality, and risk factors
• Share-price performance charts
• Tips on how and when to purchase foreign stocks and track your investments

• Expected returns
• Volatility
• Distribution of returns
• Diversification potential
• Fees
• Trading and operating expenses
• Liquidity
• Tax efficiency
• Account location
• Role in an asset-allocation program 

You don’t need to be an expert analyst, a star stock-picker, or a rocket scientist to have better investment results than most other investors. You just need to allocate your assets in the right way, and have the conviction to stick with that allocation.

The big secret behind asset allocation — the secret that most sophisticated investors know and use to their benefit — is that it’s really not all that hard to do.

Asset Allocation For Dummies serves as a comprehensive guide to maximizing returns and minimizing risk — while managing taxes, fees and other costs — in putting together a portfolio to reflect your unique financial goals.  

In Unconventional Success, investment legend David F. Swensen offers incontrovertible evidence that the for-profit mutual-fund industry consistently fails the average investor. From excessive management fees to the frequent "churning" of portfolios, the relentless pursuit of profits by mutual-fund management companies harms individual clients. Perhaps most destructive of all are the hidden schemes that limit investor choice and reduce returns, including "pay-to-play" product-placement fees, stale-price trading scams, soft-dollar kickbacks, and 12b-1 distribution charges.

Even if investors manage to emerge unscathed from an encounter with the profit-seeking mutual-fund industry, individuals face the likelihood of self-inflicted pain. The common practice of selling losers and buying winners (and doing both too often) damages portfolio returns and increases tax liabilities, delivering a one-two punch to investor aspirations.

In short: Nearly insurmountable hurdles confront ordinary investors.

Swensen's solution? A contrarian investment alternative that promotes well-diversified, equity-oriented, "market-mimicking" portfolios that reward investors who exhibit the courage to stay the course. Swensen suggests implementing his nonconformist proposal with investor-friendly, not-for-profit investment companies such as Vanguard and TIAA-CREF. By avoiding actively managed funds and employing client-oriented mutual-fund managers, investors create the preconditions for investment success.