In Dave Garff’s 2011 whitepaper, Do Countries Matter?, one of the most compelling charts was looking at the Monthly High-Low Range of country returns. The chart looked at 39 countries in both emerging and developed markets going back to 1991, and charted the monthly range of returns between the best performing market and worst performing market. Since 1991 it has been a compelling opportunity for investors to consider that by purely focusing on country selection within their global equity allocation, the long-term average monthly return range was over 33% per month.
However, since 2010 global investing has been marked by a period of significant outperformance of the United States relative to the rest of the world. As of July 31, 2014, the United States had outperformed the average country in the 39 country universe by a cumulative 56.02% in USD or an average annualized performance of 10.49% per year.
