He says that as the pool of easy credit dried up as the mortgage meltdown continued in the first quarter, access to all sorts of investment capital became even more restricted.

"The process of banks and hedge funds trying to cover bad debt forced people to sell securities that had value," Wood added.

The result was that almost every major stock index sank in the first quarter. "It was indiscriminate - we really saw an across-the-board fall by stocks," Wood said. "So it's really difficult to draw any long-term, stable investment themes over what we've seen over the last several months."

For a lot of people, he says this is a good time to buy low. A part of Russell Investments' business acts as a sort of manager of index and fund managers. The firm's pension consulting side hires different firms with various expertise in all different areas of the market to execute the firm's portfolio allocations for large pension funds and institutions.

Based on such outside input, Wood says expectations are that the lion's share of stock market growth this year won't come from the U.S. or Europe. "Even though it represents less than a third of the global GDP, we're expecting most of the growth to come from emerging markets. So a trend toward more U.S. investors turning to a globally diversified portfolio is unlikely to go away anytime soon," he said.

Wood added: "In fact, being overweight to their home country is going to be one of the biggest mistakes investors will make going forward."

At Zacks, Huemmer says his computer-generated model shows that a combination of relative valuations, earnings growth and macro trends started finding some good buying opportunities in the U.S. as the first quarter ended.

Back to Basics

"It basically moved completely out of medical, including pharmas as well as equipments and services, into basic materials," he said. "The index also shifted out of consumer discretionary and lowered our computer and technology exposure to about 18%. That put our tech exposure at just slightly higher than the S&P 500."

Several weeks ago, the portfolio also got back into financials. That sector is now about in line with the broader market at about 16.4% of its weightings.

"What we saw is that finance became a much more attractive play by the end of Q1 as prices came down substantially on many of those holdings," Huemmer said. "But as opposed to when in 2007 we were overweighting finance, now we're about in line with the broader market in finance."

In computer and technologies, earnings growth played a bigger role than valuations in that sector's fall in the index's latest rankings, he added. "It didn't move completely out of the sector, but earnings have come down enough to move the index's weightings in computers and technology to a slight overweighting from a rather large one," Huemmer said.

The fund's benchmark has also taken a significant overweight in materials with about a 20% position after prices rebounded.

"There are really several attractive areas of the market opening for at least the next 90 days," Huemmer said. "The index is slightly less defensive at this point."

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