Over the last 12 months, three, five and ten years, Wright has outperformed Washington Mutual. But the short term's not so pretty. Wright is down 7 percent for the year while Washington Mutual is down 1 percent. On the international front, Katz would up Contie's exposure from less than 3 percent of his assets to 15 percent to take advantage of the possibilities of growth around the world. The difference between an international mutual fund and a global one is that the latter can invest in domestic companies that do business overseas.
International funds are for foreign firms only and tend to be more volatile than global funds.
Katz would have him increase his exposure to indexes from less than 9 percent of his portfolio to 40 percent. That's a major change that goes against what most investors are doing now, which is dramatically cutting back on what they put into index funds. Even though just about every major market index this year is down, Katz says the notion of hitching your portfolio to a broad measure of the market still has validity. But he would do it in a special way. These market-weighted index funds put more into the biggest companies in terms of stock market capitalization than in the rest.