Top 4 Answerer.

A bad thing about foreign securities is that other countries are in one of two general camps: (1) look for anybody or anything that is doing something wrong and punish them, or (2) conveniently ignore things that go wrong because those that enforce laws are often doing wrong things too. Another way of looking at it is that in some places they realize that all the people are poor except for the rich, and some places believe that those with money are too rich so they have to tax them to make them more like the poor.

As for the stock market yoyo, yep, it does. The issue is in the long run. The average of companies across the market can sustain a surprising amount of growth. That is where mutual funds and their cousin exchange traded funds (ETFs trade much like stocks and usually have lower costs). Check out these NY (100 biggest on NYSE), ISI (S&P 1500), IYY (Dow Jones Total Market Index), and maybe even DVY (Dow Jones select Dividend). They will still yoyo, but you don’t have to check prices every day–buy them for the long haul and forget them. As you check back, say quarterly for taxes, you will see the broad, general march of value, not get hung up on down twenty today, up twelve tomorrow.

Long term–a variety of index funds and mutual funds with different investment objectives. Examples: PENNX–small cap stocks, SPY–large cap stocks, SWZ–Swiss stocks, TDF–Chinese stocks, IJH–mid cap stocks.