Six good reasons to consider global equities and four advantages of an active approach
Global equities offer multiple benefits, and actively managed strategies can be an effective option to pursue them.
Philip Robotham
Owning global equity strategies, which include both local market and international stocks, are not always investors’ initial inclination, often for a combination of reasons. First, since the end of the Global Financial Crisis, one equity market—the US—has delivered such exceptional returns, relative to international markets overall, that the value of a global approach has been less apparent. Second, some investors prefer to decide for themselves what their allocations to domestic versus international stocks will be.
For long-term investors, though, neither of these considerations diminish the multiple potential benefits that can be gained from owning global equity portfolios.
Six potential benefits of global equity strategies …
1. Gain access to more opportunities
A focus on any one market, or even a narrow set of nearby regional ones, greatly reduces the investment opportunity set. There are 44,000 publicly listed companies worldwide. As Figure 1 illustrates, even the world’s largest individual markets cannot come close to reaching that scale. Investors who focus on their own or nearby regional markets miss that world of opportunity.
2. Go where some of the greatest opportunities may lie
A number of key global trends – like changing demographics, scientific breakthroughs in fields like biotechnology, and technological innovation in areas like artificial intelligence (AI) – are creating outsized growth opportunities for the companies that operate in the sectors affected by these major changes.
Figure 1: The entire global universe offers a fuller menu of opportunities
The total number of companies globally far surpasses even some of the biggest individual and regional markets
Source: “All the World’s Publicly Traded firms in 2025,” Visual Capitalist, as at 26 February 2025.
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