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The death of the 60/40 portfolio
- histories 3y agoFor european investors: Vanguard LifeStrategy. Pick the specific etf based on your risk level (percentage of stocks, 20% or 40% or 60% or 80%) . Adjust if needed. Buy regularly, never sell until retirement.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 3y agoif individual investors bought the S&P with leverage, they would retire in 10-15 years. But the money management industry keeps people in these terrible portfolios
- paxys 3y ago> if every individual investor bought the S&P with leverage, they would retire in 10-15 years If you cherry-pick a specific period, sure. With that perfect foresight everyone can retire in a year, let alone 10-15.
- teaearlgraycold 3y agoWell, anyone. Not everyone.
- toomuchtodo 3y agoMost target date funds are invested up to 80-90% in equities early in their life, with the remainder being bonds and short term (cash) investments. The re-allocation to bonds as the target date is approached (at which point the fund converts to a terminal income fund) is to reduce equity volatility and sequence of return risk (ie maximize growth exposure when it can be tolerated, reduce exposure as risk tolerance declines due to approaching income need). We'd all like to capture maximum risk adjusted returns, but compromises must be made depending on your desired outcome and constraints.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 3y agoThis is too conservative and isnt helping people, you will work for your whole life with this investment plan and a regular income
- toomuchtodo 3y agoNeither is having a portfolio take losses you can't tolerate unless you die and someone inherits it (with recovery happening while they're holding it). If the problem is that investors don't have enough cashflow over their working years to assemble a balanced portfolio that will comfortably carry them to death, that is a different issue. Reaching for risky yield is a lottery ticket. If you maximize equity exposure too high, too long, you will potentially get blown out of the water. Broadly speaking, at some point, gains must be locked in and invested somewhere less risky (assuming your average person investing to retire). https://archive.nytimes.com/screenshots/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/01/02/business/20110102-metrics-graphic.jpg https://archive.nytimes.com/screenshots/www.nytimes.com/inte... https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/01/02/business/20110102-metrics-graphic.html https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011...
- yes_man 3y agoThat’s a diluted version of the logic that if we just printed out 10 million for each citizen, then everyone could quit their job and live rich, but the system somehow wants to keep people miserable and prevents this.
- IncreasePosts 3y agoSave for all those universes where due to leverage your investment goes to zero. Anyways, go ahead and put 100% of your portfolio in XXXX.P, and enjoy your retirement in 2034!
- ldjkfkdsjnv 3y agobasically impossible if you stay 3x and below
- IncreasePosts 3y agoWhy isn't everyone dumping their money into SPXL then? What percentage of your portfolio is leveraged s&p?
- Thrymr 3y ago> if every individual investor bought the S&P with leverage You could also go broke! (or at least significantly underperform historical averages.) Sure, you can make higher returns by taking more risk. That's not most people's tolerance in a retirement portfolio. There are plenty of other ways to diversify besides a 60-40 portfolio that are a lot lower risk.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 3y agoMost people arent educated on how leverage isnt that scary, whats scary is working a job for 50 years
- mikestew 3y agoIf you don’t want to work a job for 50 years because your portfolio got blown out, don’t buy stocks on margin. At least that’s what people who have been “educated on leverage” do.
- jltsiren 3y agoWhat is scary is living in a society, where doing something productive most of your life is undesirable.
- nuclearnice1 3y agoA slight over simplification, for example s&p was negative 1% per year from Jan 2000 to Dec 2009. Plus the cost of your leverage. But the general point that US equity returns have been good and leverage would have increased them stands. For some reason, Americans are “told” to get 4x leveraged to the real estate market but to pay for their equities with 100% cash.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago> For some reason, Americans are “told” to get 4x leveraged to the real estate market but to pay for their equities with 100% cash. Your mortgage is fixed for 15-30 years (depending on mortgage product), and your real estate cannot be margin called (unlike securities which are constantly fluctuating in price). Edit: Over leveraging on margin to buy equities? Not great. Borrowing against real estate equity to invest in equities, with rent comfortably covering the debt servicing? Potentially not as bad. TLDR Manage your risk exposure appropriately.
- traviswingo 3y agoThis reply cannot be understated. Those who are strong advocates for highly leveraged equity positions who use real estate to justify either have yet to experience a true market decline, or are simply really green to investing. If I could leverage 4:1 on the total market index using a fixed 30 year loan without the ability to force a sale I would in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, that’s just not how it works. And anything claiming to be the solution to that (like a leveraged ETF such as UPRO), suffers from volatility decay that causes it to underperform or eventually go to zero in horizontal markets (e.g. lost decades).
- perplexion 3y agoBecause if your house goes underwater, you keep living in it for years until it recovers and grows. With leverage on equity you get margin called during drops that kill your investment and give you no capture of future recoveries.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 3y agoYup. You cant get margin called on a mortgage, but theres clearly an optimal S&P leverage ratio, and its far above 1. Wild how repulsed americans are by this, when they really could retire much younger
- ta1243 3y agoIf every investor bought Bitcoin with leverage and started say 5 years ago they'd be retired now Doesn't make it a good strategy.
- madcadmium 3y agoHow much leverage though?
- mikestew 3y agoI'm approaching retirement (as in, probably months away), and allow the brokerage to manage a lot of our money for reasons that aren't important for this discussion. And even as old fogey almost-pensioners, the brokerage doesn't have us anywhere near in 40% bonds. From a bit of a skim of TFA, yeah, it's a dated strategy from a time that has long-since passed. Additionally, that portfolio allocation didn't do all that well even in the past.
- bdjsiqoocwk 3y agoYou're letting people who benefit from you trading a lot manage your money? Let me guess, do they trade a lot? Seriously, letting a brokerage manage your money, first time I hear such a thing.
- mikestew 3y agoSeriously, letting a brokerage manage your money, first time I hear such a thing. Then perhaps uninformed opinions are best left in our own heads. Though I would be happy to answer any questions, should you find the ability to ask in good faith.
- justin66 3y ago> answer any questions Does your broker have a fiduciary duty to act in your interests, as a fee-only advisor (for just one example) would?
- mikestew 3y agoYes to both. Unlike the assumptions made by another commenter, the brokerage doesn’t care how much trading goes on because they take a flat percentage each quarter. (And they don’t charge commissions on trades anyway, whether it is me trading or them.) And the advisor we work with does, indeed, have a fiduciary duty. It’s not like I don’t know what I’m doing, I managed our portfolios for decades, and did pretty well and we will retire quite comfortably. But I’m tired of doing it, I’m willing to let someone else do it now. So if anyone was picturing the movie Boiler Room, umm, that was a movie.
- dangus 3y agoI’ve never seen anyone recommend 60/40 at least in the era of forums like Reddit personal finance and Bogleheads.
- bombcar 3y ago60/40 was (always?) back-of-the-envelope math to show how it could be more performant than 100% stocks or 100% bonds with rebalancing and less risk. The other main shift has been that retirement at 65 isn't just for 10 years or so - you could be staring down 25+ years, and need the retirement income to last that long. If you can get there with 60/40, you probably should be investigating annuities as they protect against the final risk: outliving the money.
- dangus 3y agoI have always heard ratios closer to 80/20 or 90/10 unless you are approaching the annuity realm like you mention.
- daviding 3y agoHere in Canada, there was a trend for the 'Couch Potato Portfolio' with the arrival of popular ETFs that used these splits between equities and bonds and then just rebalancing once a year. The key point was really using entire index ETFs with low MER fees on auto, with the bonds portion as the stability. 'All in' ETFs have sort of replace that.
- throw0101d 3y ago> I’ve never seen anyone recommend 60/40 at least in the era of forums like Reddit personal finance and Bogleheads. It's recommended all the time in (e.g.) /r/PersonalFinanceCanada if you want a more conservative portfolio (e.g., in or nearing retirement): * https://canadiancouchpotato.com/model-portfolios/ https://canadiancouchpotato.com/model-portfolios/ or if it suits your risk profile (you'd lose sleep over large dips in your portfolio, even if you aren't in/near retirement): * https://old.reddit.com/r/PersonalFinanceCanada/wiki/investing#wiki_consider_the_risks https://old.reddit.com/r/PersonalFinanceCanada/wiki/investin... * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyOqqtq12jQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyOqqtq12jQ * https://canadianportfoliomanagerblog.com/model-etf-portfolios/ https://canadianportfoliomanagerblog.com/model-etf-portfolio...
- throw0101d 3y agoOnce again 60/40 is dead, just like it was declared in 2017, 2016, 2015, … receipts: * https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2022/06/is-the-60-40-really-dead-this-time/ https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2022/06/is-the-60-40-really... More recently in 2023: * https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2023/09/the-60-40-portfolio-is-alive-well/ https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2023/09/the-60-40-portfolio... > It’s one of my smallest accounts, but the goal is for the portfolio to be accessible […] has eleven "slices" with dozens and dozens individual holdings If that's "accessible" I would hate to see inaccessible. How the hell do you even rebalancing such a creature (e.g., individual holding having a target 4% allocation)? For anyone who is a fan of the 60/40, there's merch (in the style of "AC/DC" band) at (no affiliation): * https://www.idontshop.com https://www.idontshop.com
- debo_ 3y agoLyn's newsletter portfolio uses a US fintech that lets you declare your portfolio slices, and they maintain the balances for you. She has another portfolio that still uses her investment thesis, but does it with a smaller collection of ETFs for folks who find that more accessible.
- lvl102 3y agoWouldn’t it be more economically and fiscally efficient to…pay people after retirement by printing money on demand? It’s effectively what we are doing except we now introduced a bunch of middlemen (Wall Street) and funnel retirement money into vehicles for the rich. Current system makes no sense to me.
- the_sleaze9 3y agoYou mean like social security?
- clircle 3y agoThose wall street middlemen are way better a designing mutual funds and ETFs than I am. I am happy to pay for their expertise.
- throw0101d 3y ago> Those wall street middlemen are way better a designing mutual funds and ETFs than I am. Unless those mutual funds or ETFs are passive index funds, no they are not (unless the design is meant to extract fees): * https://www.ifa.com/articles/active-fund-managers-benchmark-analysis-sp https://www.ifa.com/articles/active-fund-managers-benchmark-...
- detourdog 3y agoThey appear to me as a make work project for the financial market professionals. I wonder if inflation is currently tied to volume of trades that are needed to maintain our economy.
- nasdaq-txn 3y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3fXfG74sK0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3fXfG74sK0
- groestl 3y ago> pay people after retirement by printing money on demand? Yepp, it is. It's called "Umlageverfahren" here in Austria, which makes it sound it's based on direct transfers from working to retired, but it's basically the same system. The crucial point is, that is saves on the middlemen.
- boringg 3y agoSo the majority of gains in their portfolio are strictly from bitcoin. Is this death of 60/40 in order to get a soft sell on a long bullish bitcoin perspective / sell of newsletter? I'm not sure what I am supposed to be getting out of this article.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- debo_ 3y agoFrom the article: > I have been recommending what I have called the “three pillar portfolio” during this period of fiscal dominance. It has been a cornerstone concept of how I have been investing in the macro sense. For me, the three main pillars consist of 1) profitable equities 2) commodities/producers and hard monies and 3) cash-equivalents.
- resource_waste 3y agoI think we are far beyond a random blogger being able to rally bitcoin. I think you are just reading a real believer's perspective.
- boringg 3y agoFair. It's funny to see it from an investment perspective that completely lacks fundamental analysis and relies upon scarcity and momentum. I guess if you bound it with contracts limiting the downside risk it works to get some single hits and up the portfolio. However holding it on its own you need to have a belief in its fundamental value.
- throw0101d 3y agoBengen's 1994 paper (which kicked off the (so-called) "Four Percent Rule") recommended asset allocations with no less than 50% in equities, but no more 75% for retirement savings when you have retired: * PDF: https://web.archive.org/web/20120417135441/http://www.retailinvestor.org/pdf/Bengen1.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20120417135441/http://www.retail... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Bengen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Bengen 60/40 would be in the middle of that. More recent research shows that the range is still valid with thirty years more data: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retirement_spend-down#Withdrawal_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retirement_spend-down#Withdraw... You may wish to be a bit more bond-heavy a little before retirement and for the first few years to counter sequence of returns risk (see Kitces' "bond tent" concept): * https://www.kitces.com/blog/managing-portfolio-size-effect-with-bond-tent-in-retirement-red-zone/ https://www.kitces.com/blog/managing-portfolio-size-effect-w... (The 4% Rule should not necessarily be taken literally, but is a good mental rule of thumb and starting point: best to hire a (fee-only) advisor to run the numbers for an actual plan.)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- wrs 3y agoWait, what? This person has multiple personal investment accounts that use different strategies? And (this is key) their retirement money is in none of those, but a “relatively passive indexed” portfolio! They may as well start this newsletter with a banner saying “For Entertainment Purposes Only”.