“That makes it an incredibly cheap opportunity and arguably provides tremendous value for investors with long-term time horizons,” Luschini said. “But it’s hardly a conventional investment for mainstream investors.”

Investors keen on the international sphere should be attuned to currency wars as governments debase their currencies to remain competitive in the aftermath of last decade’s massive global credit bubble that produced overcapacity issues.

“When that happens the only way to compete is on price, and countries compete on price by depreciating their currency,” Bernstein said. “Nobody wants a strong currency, and that’s why we’ve been so bullish on the dollar for the past three or four years because with other currencies there’s a race to the bottom.

“If you’re in emerging-market bonds you’ve got a lot to worry about,” he continued. “People think emerging-market debt is fantastic because it’s higher-yielding and a great source of income, but they don’t have a clue about where this is going.”

The underlying message: consider the importance of hedging currency risk.

“I haven’t talked about currency in my entire career as much as I have in the past six months, so you have to acknowledge, if not embrace it,” Luschini said. “We’re seeing the ETF industry continuing to provide more options in that [currency-hedging] space, and we’re using them in our portfolio construct to negate that issue.”

On the home front, Luschini said his firm is “a little out of consensus” regarding return expectations for U.S. equities. He noted that calls for an 8 percent to 10 percent rate of return are too rosy. While he still expects positive returns, he offered that full valuations in U.S. equities should result in lumpier results and more volatility.

Delving further into U.S. markets, Luschini suggested that dividend payers are still worth a look. “The dividend equity story isn’t dead,” Luschini said, adding that dividend-paying stocks can cushion the blow of a market drawdown while offering the potential for boosting overall returns.

Since the start of last year, perhaps the most-asked question in investing circles has been when will the U.S. Federal Reserve raise interest rates. Many people thought it would happen in 2014, and they were wrong. The consensus is it will finally happen this year.

Wesbury from First Trust Advisors is in that camp. And if and when it does happen, he sees no need for collective angst among investors because he believes the Fed won’t go crazy with it. “All the Fed will do is get less loose; it won’t be tight,” he said. “And that’s the key because you worry about a tight Fed, not a less-loose Fed.”