Portfolio construction and international diversification during crisis

Portfolio diversification is a procedure by which investor allocates and divides his or her funds into different type of securities. Unlike the investing all the funds solely into one security, diversification enables to reduce the risk of an investment by splitting one big risk into several small, unrelated risks. This master thesis examines the problem of diversification during a financial crisis, when usually the risk of an investment and uncertainty of future incomes from investment is relatively higher. The main goal of this thesis is to define whether is it more efficient and beneficial to diversify the portfolio solely from national securities or conversely to diversify internationally. In the theoretical part, it offers literature background on topics related to capital market, fundamentals of portfolio and fundamental analysis. In the empirical part it examines the risk and return of three national portfolios on monthly basis during a 10-year investment period, which is separated into three individual periods, in order to better observe the impacts of crisis. In order to fulfill the main goal of the thesis, composite international portfolio was constructed and observed on the same manner as the three national portfolios. Afterwards the outcomes were compared and conclusions were stated. Internationally diversified portfolio has not achieved remarkably better result than individual national portfolios. Therefore, it may be concluded that there is no strong need for an investor to diversify his or her portfolio internationally, as it does not show better results as nationally diversified portfolios.