investing, diversification, and human capital

Remember the importance of human capital when trying to figure out what to invest in. From allfinancialmatters

'I talked to two friends who worked in i-banking recently and asked what they invested in. One invested in index ETFs and a few actively managed, low-expense mutual funds in small-cap and foreign sectors, mostly because of the reasons stated above. The other said his 401-k was invested in, of all things, fixed-income and gold, which really surprised me. But his reasoning made sense: his job is in researching in Asian small-cap equities, meaning his salary and bonus was already tightly tied to a highly risky asset class, so by putting his retirement account in essentially the opposite type of investment, he was diversifying across all his current and future income sources. This is actually a very common practice in i-banking.