Issue attachment (not archived)View the full April 2015 Portfolio Notes here.country-portfolio-notes-april-2015.pdf
March Comments
The MSCI ACWI was down -1.55% in March and only 25% of the countries in the model had positive returns. The range of returns between countries stayed fairly wide at 21.57%.
Dollar strength is continuing to impact investment returns. The currency impact on international equities cost dollar based investors 2.46% last month.
Performance in Chinese equities has played a major role in the recent strategy outperformance. China is up 24.0% over the last 12 months while the average country is down -2.38%.
April Rankings
The regional impact from China and Japan has helped strengthen the case for Hong Kong which is now the #3 country in the model.
The US has continued to move slowly down the rankings and is moving towards a neutral allocation. If international continues to show increased momentum, we would expect the US to settle in the middle of rankings during the second quarter.