It’s official: You can reduce your investment risk simply by chucking darts at a list of stocks, then buying them.

That’s if you believe a Nobel economist, of course. His crude “experiment” was the start of “modern portfolio theory” decades ago. The downside, however, was that with a reduction of risk came a dampening of profits. So scratch that idea.

How about this? A startling study in the late 1970s showed that owning a portfolio of large U.S. companies with international divisions drops your risk 10% below a domestic stock portfolio. Much better. But that wasn’t the eye-popper…

The study also found that owning stocks in international companies cuts your risk in half…

Take that, “efficiency” theorists! Yet the stuffy professors still tried to refute these results. It was a losing battle, though, as more studies emerged, laden with more evidence that international stocks reduce risk.

But the