As I note in this weekend’s Your Money column, it’s times like these that tempt us to send a message to governmental leaders who won’t make hard choices and take our stock market money to countries that seem safer.

I will admit to having those feelings myself last weekend, but I know better than to invest on the basis of emotion. Still, the desire to flee the United States and Europe for places that seem more stable forces all of us to look at the actual split between our home country and others in the stock portion of our investment portfolios.

Too many people exhibit a home bias toward local stocks. The knee-jerk reaction I had recently would suggest a contempt bred by familiarity.

Acting on either is a bad idea, though. For people in the United States, having about a third of your stocks outside the country seems to be the rough consensus of the asset allocation experts I consulted this week.

But the market is made up of people like you. So how are you splitting up your stock money?

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=a0b6efcdc2f76b076092c6b46d91c957