High risk and high return are generally understood to go together, but are there exceptions? Are there ways to find a higher return with a lower risk? The strategy described here is to select countries based upon a positive current account as a percentage of the countries own GDP.

Those countries with the highest current account are those countries most likely to weather the storm should world economies take a turn for the worst, because these are the countries with the most investment assets under their own control. If there is a market downturn, these will decline along with everything else, but if we start to see soverign defaults, I think these are the countries least likely to fail.

Recently, it has become very popular, to deride buy and hold as a strategy for investment. It is reasonable to ask how much of this change in investment philosphy is a result of the losses that most of us experienced from late 1997 through 1998. and how much is the result of more rational insight.

Those who still support buy and hold, focus on the difficulty of timing the market; and those who disagree with buy and hold focus on the need to time the market in order to have consistently good returns. Clearly, almost anyone can time the market well some of the time, the important question is how frequently does this occur. Or, what is the probability that a decision to time the market will in fact be a good decision. There is a simple way to answer this question.