Two key lessons ETF investors could learn from fitness plans
Marketing Communication
The basic thinking behind investing1 resembles the steady, incremental steps you could take towards becoming fitter and healthier.
There are no shortcuts to building fitness and resilience. The same seems to be true for investing. To meet your goals in investing, as with fitness training, you might consider a combination of consistency, patience and diversification2.
These are core ideas to consider when you open a newspaper or news website to read the latest headlines. This is why it is important to remember two core principles when investing for the long-term:
Very few people can go from the couch to running 5km overnight, or from a sedentary lifestyle to lifting heavy weights after one or two sessions in the gym.
Progress, when it comes to fitness, is slow and incremental.
Making a similar point but with investing in mind, legendary investor Warren Buffet once said: “The stock market is a device to transfer money from the impatient to the patient.”
When it comes to investing in stocks, or equities, patience matters. Responding to uncertainty by simply withdrawing your investments is rarely the best option: if markets rally, investors who exit prematurely may potentially risk missing out on the recovery. Instead, a more constructive strategy balances risk with the potential opportunity for long‑term returns3.
In a similar way, your fitness won’t improve if you only go for a run on a sunny day. It’s all about consistency and getting your running shoes on your feet on a regular basis – even during stormy weather.
1 Investment involves risks. For more information, please refer to the Risk section below.2 Diversification does not guarantee a profit or protect against a loss. 3 Past performance does not predict future returns.
Most fitness plans will include cardiovascular activities (like running) and strength training (like lifting weights).
Each activity does a different job and together they could make you fitter, happier, and more productive – perhaps even more resilient.
Over-training either element could increase the risk of injury or minimise your overall fitness returns. But a mix of both could bring health benefits. Cardio could increase stamina and help with fat loss, while strength training could help to build muscle and improve posture.
Such an approach could be extended to investing1. Without a diverse3 set of investments, your portfolio faces the fitness equivalent of over-training and potential risk. In the case of investing, this would be concentration risk, which is when your portfolio is overly focused on a single country, sector, theme or region – or it could also mean that you might miss growth potential elsewhere because you might have failed to cast the net wide enough.
The key, then, could be to build a resilient, long‑term diversified2 portfolio with a mix of different types of investments that are not always correlated, so when one asset falls in value another may rise. The graphic illustrates how an investor invested in an undiversified portfolio, which includes only Investment 1, would face a 5% fall in value in their portfolio. The diversified2 portfolio includes several other investments in addition to Investment 1, which could both spread the relative risk and open up the investor to growth potential through other investments (although it is worth noting that even a diversified2 portfolio could suffer losses).
*Source: Amundi. For illustrative purposes only.Diversification does not guarantee a profit or protect against a loss. ^Assumes equal weighting of investments in 2025
There is no single way to diversify an investment portfolio. One approach could be to consider a broad global equity ETF. This could expose your investment to potential growth generated by companies across various countries and regions, while also avoiding too much exposure risk to any single sector.
Amundi offers a range of global equity ETFs. The Amundi Prime All Country World UCITS ETF Acc4 includes 3,580 stocks across dozens of developed and emerging markets (DM and EM).
With a similar all-country approach, which includes DM and EM countries, the Amundi MSCI All Country World UCITS ETF EUR Acc5 comprises 2,514 stocks covering 23 DM and EM economies.
The Amundi Core MSCI World UCITS ETF Acc5 has a slightly narrower approach, with 1,319 DM stocks, but still offers potential diversification3 compared to a single country, regional or sector fund.
4 For more information regarding the index methodology, please refer to www.solactive.com. Data as at end December 20255 For more information regarding the index methodology, please refer to www.msci.com. Data as at end December 2025
