Devina Mehra's global portfolio lesson for families with ties abroad

Devina Mehra, founder of First Global, an India-based research and wealth management firm, reported keeping roughly eighty-five percent of her personal portfolio invested outside India. That is a deliberate geographic split for someone whose professional life is centered on Indian markets.

She attributed eighty-five to ninety percent of long-term portfolio outcomes to asset allocation rather than individual security selection. That framing elevates country, sector, and asset-class weights over hot stock tips. The 1997 Asian financial crisis shaped her skepticism toward concentrated regional bets. Living through sharp currency and market breaks left a preference for spreading exposure across economies.

Children of immigrants often hold mental accounts in two countries at once. Parents may own apartments in Mumbai and a rental in Texas while kids max out U.S. retirement accounts and send remittances. Mehra's eighty-five percent outside India is a provocative mirror for Indian American families. It asks whether your household is accidentally concentrated in the country you understand best emotionally, not just financially.

The 1997 Asian crisis may feel distant until a cousin mentions currency controls or a property market freeze overseas. Diaspora savers sometimes discover that safe family real estate abroad is hard to sell when everyone needs cash at the same time. Asset allocation as the main driver can relieve pressure to pick the next winning stock on either side of the ocean.

Mehra described being structurally underweight the United States relative to many global benchmarks, reflecting her outlook on valuations and risks rather than a default home-country bias in reverse. Underweighting the U.S. is not a template for most first-gen builders whose salaries, mortgages, and kids' college funds are dollar-denominated. The lesson is to name your base currency and match it to where you will actually spend.

She expressed caution on real estate as a primary wealth engine and on private credit products marketed as high-yield alternatives to public bonds. Skepticism toward real estate and private credit hits close to home when elders say land never fails. Sometimes it does not fail, but it also does not fund a nursing home bill in New Jersey on short notice.

She reviews portfolios quarterly with what she called a base-zero mindset, willing to rebuild the allocation case from scratch instead of anchoring on past decisions. Quarterly base-zero reviews are a habit more than a product. They can be a family calendar reminder: what changed in immigration rules, inheritance law abroad, or your own career that should change weights, if anything.

Cross-border wealth is as much paperwork as percentages. FATCA, PFIC rules, and foreign tax credits do not fit in a headline but they decide whether a clever allocation is livable in practice. AI themes will show up in WeChat forwards and YouTube sidebars. Mehra's discipline is to treat themes as slices, not the whole pie, especially when FOMO crosses time zones.

You do not need to copy an eighty-five percent split to learn from it. The generational move is to make geographic concentration a conscious choice, not a default left over from where your parents felt safe buying. When parents want investments back home for emotional reasons, children can acknowledge the feeling while separating sentimental property from retirement security.

If your parents ask why you hold international funds when America is safest, you can explain diversification as spreading family risk the same way they avoided betting every relative on one business idea. See How to Build Generational Wealth as a Child of Immigrants for broader wealth frameworks that account for cross-border households.