VXUS

VXUS is the least exciting thing on this list, and that's the entire point. It owns roughly 8,700 stocks from every developed and emerging market outside the United States — Japan, the UK, Canada, Australia, France, Taiwan, South Korea, and dozens more. There's nothing to analyze about it. No management decisions, no earnings to beat, no thesis to be right or wrong about. It costs 0.05% a year, which works out to fifty cents on every thousand dollars invested. Shares trade around $86 with a dividend yield around 2.4%, which is roughly double what US stocks currently pay. The recent performance is worth noting because it runs against a long habit. VXUS is up about 12.7% this year and 27% over the past twelve months. For most of the last decade, international stocks were the thing you owned and regretted — US markets, especially US tech, ran away from everything else and never looked back. That stretch bred a widespread belief that international exposure is dead weight. This year has been a reminder that the pattern isn't permanent. The one long-run drag to be aware of is that it's returned about 6.6% annually since 2011, well below what US stocks did over the same period, and much of that gap is currency: when the dollar is strong, foreign returns shrink when converted back to dollars. When the dollar weakens, it works the other way. The reason we hold this is exactly what we said about gold, but from a different angle. Nearly everything else we've covered — Celestica, Credo, Coherent, NVIDIA, Lam, Corning, IREN, Amazon — is a US company betting on the same AI buildout. That's a heavy concentration in one country, one theme, and one decade. VXUS is the counterweight. Two honest caveats: it isn't as separate from the AI trade as you might assume, since its largest holding is Taiwan Semiconductor and SK Hynix and ASML are also up top — the chip supply chain is genuinely global. And this fund has gone through multi-year stretches of doing nothing while US stocks soared, which is uncomfortable to sit through. That discomfort is the price of not having every dollar riding on one bet. We don't expect this to be the thing that makes the portfolio work. We expect it to be the thing that keeps a bad decade from being a disaster. (written with the help of Claude)