I noted, probably inappropriately, on the Investment Performance thread, that the outperformance of international and emerging markets versus the S&P over the last 3 months was a bit surprising--but welcome, since I keep 1/3 of stock investment in foreign funds. They often lag the S&P--and often for years at a time--but when they outperform, they can outperform yugely, often not much in correlation with the S&P, which is attractive.
This outperformance often accompanies dollar weakness, which appears to be the case the last 6 months or two.
I expect dollar weakness to continue for a while, so I tapped some of my over-large cash and put it in a broad international and Asian fund; the former is dollar hedged, so I will probably look for an unhedged similar fund, since I expect to continue this for the next year, to use some of my excess cash. The "resolution" of Brexit may (or may not) help the Euro versus the dollar; we'll see; the outperformance of Asian economies I suspect definitely have helped their currencies versus the US dollar.
This is not germane, but I was surprised to see my (small) gold miner fund up 6.5% today and 36% over one year. I mostly keep it to alert me to weird moves, usually currency/inflation fears related. This also usually accompanies dollar weakness.
But sooner or later the dollar will strengthen; I suspect later, after the COVID recession. At the current pace of vaccination, that may take a bit of a while, but there are other factors at work to dollar weakness, including probably excessive dollar strength for quite a few years. But I'm no currency guru--just interested for years at the apparent correlation with foreign fund performance versus S&P.
