Popular answers range from 50% to zero.

Right now, the U.S. stock market accounts for about 40% of the world’s stock market cap a fairly massive fraction considering that the country has less than 5% of the globe’s population. But that still leaves another 60% of public company stock being traded on foreign exchanges, and some of those are in emerging markets where one might expect faster growth than our mature economy could deliver.

This leads to a natural question and one that was asked recently by a Motley Fool Answers listener: How much of a welldiversified portfolio should be allocated into international stocks? There’s a wide range of thought on the matter, but for this episode, hosts Alison Southwick and Robert Brokamp have special guest Buck Hartzell, director of Investor Learning and Operations at The Motley Fool, to help break down the arguments.

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