Friend Lewis Braham, writing in Barron’s, offered “The Chaos-Resistant Fund Portfolio” on April 7, 2025. For those who have not seen Lewis’s essay, here’s a recap. He begins with a fairly stark warning that parallels ours:
Voters elected Trump specifically as a populist disrupter. He’s doing what they asked. While Democrats call Trump an autocrat for consolidating power in the executive branch, that’s largely irrelevant to Wall Street, as money managers have happily invested billions in authoritarian or quasi-authoritarian regimes … The problem now is that with limited checks from other government branches, investors are increasingly dependent on Trump’s whims, whether they consider him pro-business or not.
Right now, he seems anti-investor.
Mr. Braham recommends four strategic allocation choices for your consideration:
Cash, “the most obvious form of downside protection,” is accessible through money market funds yielding 4.5%.
Bonds “have proved to be defensive this year,” but short-term high yield, which is mostly insulated from interest rate changes, might bear special attention.
Gold, particularly bullion, “is the oldest hedge. It offers especially useful protection against geopolitical uncertainty.”
Hedged mutual funds “can prove useful if both stocks and bonds fall.”
Large-Cap Value Stocks “reduce risk” in a portfolio heavily tilted toward indexes like the S&P 500. He gives a special nod here to GQG Partners.
Global equities “make good diversifiers, especially now, as they’re rising while the U.S. stumbles.” In my own portfolio, the strongest performers in 2025 are the two Seafarer funds: Overseas Value (11.2% YTD) and Overseas Growth & Income (9.6%). Lewis mentions First Eagle Global (8.5%, with a portfolio that might hold bonds, cash, or gold as well as stocks) and Causeway International Value (13.5%) as worthy candidates for your due diligence list.
