With equity markets performing reasonably poorly in the short term I thought it may be instructive to look at the YTD performance of a basket of markets. The snip below is from Finviz.com a handy little website that generates performance metrics over time.
The unfortunate thing about being an equities only trader is that you are very limited in your universe and it is possible for equity markets to go nowhere for a considerable period of time. Whilst, the notion of diversification is misunderstood and oversold by the sell side of the investing world the good thing about commodities is the lack of correlation between them. In particular the lack of correlation between them and equities is quite comforting.
