What does “diversification” mean?
To many retail investors “diversification” means owning a collection of stocks, bonds, mutual funds or Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs). But that’s really not what diversification is all about.
What’s the big deal about diversification anyhow?
Diversification means that you are spreading the risk of loss by putting your investment assets in several different categories of investments. Examples include stocks, bonds, money market instruments, commodities, and real estate. Within each of these categories you can slice even finer. For example, stocks can be classified as large cap (big companies), mid cap (medium sized companies), small cap (smaller companies), domestic (U.S. companies), and foreign (non-U.S. companies).
And within each of these categories you can look for industry diversification. Many people lost their savings in 2000 when the “Tech Bubble” burst because they owned too many technology-oriented stocks. Others lost big when the real estate market crashed in late 2007 because they focused too much of their portfolio in bank stocks.
The idea behind owning a variety of asset classes is that different asset classes will go in different directions independent of each other. Theoretically, if one goes down, another may go up or hold it’s value. There is a term for this: “correlation.” Investment assets that have a high correlation tend to move in the same direction, those with a low correlation do not. These assumptions do not always hold true, but they are true often enough that proper diversification is a valuable tool to control risk.
Many investors believe that if they own a number of different mutual funds they are diversified. They are, of course, more diversified than someone who owns only a single stock. But many funds own the same stocks. We have to look within the fund, to the things they own, and their investment styles, to find out if your funds are merely duplicates of each other or if you are properly diversified.
You need to look at a “portfolio x-ray” which will show you how much overlap there is between two or more mutual funds.
Only by looking at your portfolio with this view of diversification can you determine if you are diversified or if you have accidentally concentrated your portfolio without realizing it.
