After the Dam Breaks...

....we'll be more free to swim.

As people pick up the pieces of their portfolios -- which they'd thought were diversified effectively to avoid losing as much money as they did -- we expect to see waves of new product offerings for individual investors: more "market neutral" equity funds (which rise only when fund managers' longs do better than their shorts), more portfolios that promise to have uncorrelated components based on recent history, more "bear market" equity funds, even more "hard assets" funds, and so on.

The choices will be bewildering to many individual investors, but there will be a few new offerings that will make us better off, too.