Conventionally, when bond yields go down, stocks go up. Interest rates (and, consequently, bond yields) have been very low for a number of years now. This has

Conventionally, when bond yields go down, stocks go up. Interest rates (and, consequently, bond yields) have been very low for a number of years now. This has led to a lot of capital being deployed in the stock market instead. So that explains why there is a lot of money which wants to be invested in the stock market right now. This may or may not be tempered by a near-future hike in interest rates. Vanguard started out in 1975 but it only had one fund - a mutual fund tracking the S&P 500 - for the first decade of its existence. It has added new funds since the crash of 1987. If you look at the market since that time, the dot-com bubble was for tech stocks specifically and the housing bubble didn't have much to do with stocks at all (until after it burst, anyways). There hasn't been demand for the entire stock market since Vanguard started to become popular and well-known. This is why demand for index funds is near an all-time high. Throwing everything into Vanguard isn't a bad idea. Buying AAPL, WFC, MMM and VBR (or similar) is not a bad idea. Dividend aristocrats isn't a bad idea. You can come close to replicating market performance with a small subsection of the market. If you have good returns from your rental real estate, keep it. Or rather, keep at least some of it for diversification. I too have a thing for contrarianism but I think that some stock strategy is worth pursuing. The people whose portfolios do best are those who forget about them[0] [0] http://www.businessinsider.com/forgetful-investors-performed-best-2014-9 http://www.businessinsider.com/forgetful-investors-performed...