The world is his oyster

Jeff Opdyke’s syndicated column for the Wall Street Journal has provided a wide audience from his Baton Rouge home office, but for his next assignment you can add “far” to that description.

The Journal is sending Opdyke and his family to Hong Kong, where he’ll spend the next few years reporting and writing about international investing for the Journal’s Heard on the Street column.

Now under the control of media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, the Journal appears to be taking a more global approach to business coverage, which could explain Opdyke’s move to Hong Kong. The new job is certainly a direct result of his latest book, The World is Your Oyster: The Guide to Finding Great Investments Around the Globe.

To Opdyke, diversifying globally doesn’t mean adding Toyota stock to your portfolio. His book teaches investors how to open and manage trading accounts in New Zealand, Singapore and Indonesia in order to gain access to local stocks there. It’s foreign, local stocks that stand to profit from the biggest economic boom of our lifetime: the explosion of the middle class in China, and the rest of the developing world.

While Opdyke may not be exactly famous in Baton Rouge, millions of Wall Street Journal readers have come to know the 42-year-old and his family through his popular weekend column, Love and Money, which he’s written from his Baton Rouge home office since 2002.

He welcomes readers into the personal nexus of finance and marriage, sharing everything from how he and his wife, Amy, handle money differently, to intimate family moments, such as a recent column about paying for speech therapy for their 5-year-old. “With tears in her eyes, our little girl responded that no one had played with her because, as she told Amy, ‘they don’t understand me,’” he recently wrote.

Love and Money will cease publication this summer as the Opdykes prepare for the move to a new home in Hong Kong. As a journalist he relishes the opportunity to report on China, which he sees as the biggest economic story of his lifetime.

It’ll be part of Opdyke’s new job to tell Journal readers about foreign companies. International investing has been his forte since 1995, when he committed to diversifying his family’s investments.

Moving to Hong Kong is daunting but exciting, he says. Amy, a hospital administrator, gets to spend more time at home with their young children, while the couple hopes the international experience will help prepare the youngsters for a radically different future in which a key skill for success just might be the ability to speak Mandarin.