The U.S. has two presidential candidates opposed to new free trade agreements. In the last two years, the value of global trade has contracted as anti-globalization movements pop up everywhere.

However, the "death of free trade has been vastly overstated," Schwab's chief global investment strategist Jeff Kleintop told attendees on Monday at the Schwab Impact conference in San Diego.

Much of the decline in global trade is directly attributable to the fall in the price of oil, but other trends are also at work. For example, he said 60 percent of Japanese “manufactured goods” are made in the countries where they are sold today. In other words, a Toyota made and sold in the U.S. puts a different spin on the notion of global trade.

Kleintop also identified another phenomenon that have escaped most American investors and some advisors. The MSCI World Index has essentially gone nowhere over the last decade, rising less than 2 percent annually.

Why? Kleintop noted this can be explained by changes in the global economy and the composition of the index since 2006. Back then, the driving force in the world's economy was China, which was building a city the size of Houston every six weeks. Energy and materials accounted for 50 percent of global profits; today, they are just over 20 percent.

Profit margins for companies in the MSCI World Index are off by one-third in the past decade. This is one reason why Kleintop believes global investors can expect mid-single digit returns in the next decade.

He then produced some charts displaying remarkable correlations between countries and industries. The U.S. stock market acts almost exactly like "one big tech sector ETF," he said, showing a chart that revealed as much. It makes sense when one realizes the country's five biggest companies by market cap are Apple, Alphabet, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon.

That's why U.S. has outperformed over the past five years and underperformed in the early-2000s era. The Canadian stock market looks very much like "one big leveraged energy ETF" while the Japanese equity market performs like a financial sector ETF.