Here's some background on rebalancing: http://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Rebalancing
Btw, I highly recommend Bogleheads.com if you want to learn more about personal portfolio management.
And that's the story of how I realized my roommate had screwed me over when he convinced me to open a Roth IRA with him at Primerica with the money from my junior-year internship. >1.5% ER, 12b1 fee, front-load sales, the works.
He ended our friendship when I transferred the account to Vanguard.
I've seen some ridiculous returns on offshore funds. Have a look at some of the Southern African funds (though it does include non-SouthAfrican funds as well):
So it's the foreign-exchange rate that adds risk/volatility, I see.
for example our platform doesn't really care which security it works with whether it's a stock, and EFT or bitcoin it doesn't matter.
the problem is finding the financial custodian that will execute your trades using the said currency. we did have real interest in someone supplementing their portfolio with bitcoins... but we can't find a clearing house/custodian that would execute relevant trades for us.
if there is an international custodian that we can hook into to work with securities from other countries, it's a no brainer.
that's why open source wins. we are not restricted by any regulation or market conditions. if the technology exists and we can hook into it, it's possible.