Investors find no escape from market storm

NEW YORK – Even the most balanced investors have gotten knocked on their heels this year.

Typically, spreading one’s bets across several different types of investments has helped deliver steadier returns. When U.S. stocks slide, say, bonds and gold can hopefully help offset the losses. Or maybe stocks abroad will hold up better than their U.S. counterparts.

Not so this year. U.S. stocks have endured some breathtaking drops the last several weeks, slicing the S&P 500’s year-to-date return to 2.2 percent after including dividends. But markets in Germany, South Korea, Hong Kong and elsewhere are solidly in the red year to date.

Even worse for investors who carefully built up balanced portfolios to protect themselves from potential downturns: The investments that are supposed to offer safer returns have also struggled at the same time.

It’s a rude reminder that one of the bedrock tenets of investing – don’t keep too much of your portfolio concentrated in any one thing – doesn’t guarantee success by itself. But it’s also important to remember that this year’s struggles have been a relative anomaly.

If conditions hold, this may be only the seventh time in the last 46 years that investors would have lost money if they had divvied up their portfolio equally among seven investment groups, including stocks, bonds and commodities, according to the Leuthold Group.

Since 1973, investors would have gotten a 10.2 percent annualized return if they had a portfolio that split evenly each year across commodities, large U.S. stocks, small U.S. stocks, real-estate investment trusts, 10-year Treasurys, gold and foreign developed-market stocks. That’s nearly as big a return as the S&P 500 itself, at 10.4 percent, with significantly less volatility.

“Given this strategy’s required skill (none) and trading frequency (minimal), the results border on the remarkable,” Leuthold’s chief investment officer Doug Ramsey wrote in a recent report.

That’s what makes this year’s widespread pain so much more painful.