19th June 2026
Schroders: Global equities: one-country bias doesn’t always pay
The rise of US technology mega-caps has led to the US stockmarket dwarfing the markets of other countries. Several of the largest US companies, such as Nvidia, Apple or Alphabet, eachhave individual values which are comparable with – or bigger than – the total value of the entire stockmarkets of other countries such as the UK or Japan.
As a result, investors around the world are used to having large US allocations. If they based their portfolios on a global stock index such as the MSCI World, they would have 70% of their portfolio in US stocks (as of the end of April 2026).
But although the US stockmarket is by far the world’s biggest, it does not always generate the biggest returns.
The chart below shows how the fortunes of the US market have fluctuated in recent months, based on quarterly returns compared with other countries’ markets.
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