Here's the AFR's Patrick Commins on why offshore investors aren't keen on Aussie shares:

It's an article of faith among investment professionals: Aussies have too much money in domestic shares.

And they're probably right. About half of our money is in domestic shares, on Rainmaker numbers. And for self-managed super funds, the allocation to offshore shares is miniscule.

That said, it does makes sense to keep our money close to home.

"That home bias is absolutely justified," Franklin Templeton Investments head of equities Stephen Dover says.

It's ironic, really. I have come all the way to Saigon, Vietnam, to interview some of the most senior people at Franklin Templeton, a firm with a mighty $US750 billion in assets under management, to hear that our preference for Aussie shares is "absolutely justified".

"It doesn't mean it doesn't make sense to diversify globally," Dover clarifies. "It just means that to diversify globally has a higher hurdle than it does in other countries."

FT purchased Australian fund manager Balanced Equity Management a little over six years ago, meaning Dover can see our sharemarket from both an overseas and local angle.

And his comments on the local market don't come unprompted – I did ask for how overseas investors view our market. There's that home bias again.

Around 30 per cent of the Aussie sharemarket is foreign-owned. That may sound like a lot, but it's low for a developed market, Dover says. And what gives us our home bias also makes our sharemarket less attractive to foreigners.

Between the preferential tax treatment of our compulsory superannuation system and our dividend franking credit scheme, "the same stream of earnings [from an ASX-listed company] is more valuable to an Australian investor than it is to foreign investors – and that is unusual," Dover explains.

"That makes Australian equities more expensive relative to equities in other markets, so it makes it less favourable to foreign investors."

The end result: relatively little offshore ownership.