Is anybody familiar with the Swiss markets?

[SunTrader]

They're going to be more dependent on international recruits. The United States has more options from within. The makeup of a city like NYC will shift faster than the makeup of the whole country. A guy from Alabama might go work in NYC for a couple of years and be replaced by a guy from Colorado. Yes, this happens with international talent as well, but it's generally easier to hire/recruit from within a country's borders. The best of the best talent doesn't distribute the same way either. The largest companies in the United States (Apple, Google, Microsoft, Tesla, etc) will get a significantly higher percentage of the top talent than the next tier of companies.

Again scale matters. The SMI, leading Swiss stock market index is comprised of 20 components which represent 80% of the total capitalization. Compared that to S&P 500's components representing similar total cap.

 

[M.W.]

When you look to aggressively grow your portfolio you are not looking at economies that scale. You look for companies that aggressively grow, offer superior product at competitive pricing, and where barriers of entry are high. That can be in developing markets equally as in saturated economies. Almost always the highest growth is observed in midsized companies, you don't need to go with large caps. The work lies in combing through the many companies that potentially qualify.

I mean, I'm using the United States as the benchmark as it was the best performer over the past decade. It also holds the world's reserve currency. It has the largest financial market in the world. Using the States as my benchmark, I'm looking for places to beat it. Europe, China, and India are the only places in the world that can match the United States in terms of scalability. However, Europe is a mixture of countries (some better run than others), China is a communist dictatorship with limited economic freedom, and India is still highly protectionist/lacking economic freedom. So if I'm willing to sacrifice scalability where do I go?