Are my investments too exposed to Trump’s America?

F

or the past decade or so, investors haven’t needed to look very far in their hunt for growth.

The S&P 500, the index of the largest companies in the United States, is up 227 per cent over 10 years. A £1,000 investment in a low-cost tracker in August 2015 would be worth about £3,250 today — it doesn’t get much easier than that.

By comparison, the same £1,000 would be worth less than £1,500 today if you had opted for the UK’s main index, the FTSE 100, instead.

The amount of money flooding into US stocks over the past 10 to 15 years means that the size of the market has ballooned in line with the market caps of the technology stocks that have driven much of the growth. American companies account for about 70 per cent of the global stock market.