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60/40 Is Incomplete

From an episode of the Standard Deviations podcast, Eric Crittenden and host Daniel Crosby discuss why a stock and bond portfolio unnecessarily misses out on better performance. By including other assets, investors have the opportunity to simultaneously increase returns and reduce risk.

Transcript

My position on this is that a 60 40 portfolio is good but incomplete. Hmm. It's just capital formation markets, stocks, and bonds. It's completely ignoring all the risk transfer markets, all the futures and the forwards and energies, metals, grains, all the soft commodities unnecessarily.

And I would point out that a 60 40 portfolio historically has not been bulletproof. I mean, most people have been paying attention, during a a disinflationary period. So from 1982 to 2020, a 60 40 portfolio had every advantage started off with high rates. You had disinflation and declining rates and expanding multiples.

Literally everything that could go right did go right for a stock and bond portfolio during that period of time. And. Bonds were negatively correlated with stocks. So you got a free, perfect hedge in there too. So something that compounded at seven, 8% a year and was a great hedge against what was on the other side of your portfolio, compounding at nine to 11 or 12% a year.

So what I'm saying is that that's as good as I could model it out. If I went back in time and did a Monte Carlo simulation of all the future possible permutations that would be in the 90th percentile, that's what you got. Right. So, but if we look at other periods of time, say from 1940 to 1980, bonds had a total return that was negative in real terms, they lost money for 40 years.

40 years. And there was nobody in 1982 saying, you know, you're a moron if you don't own bonds. Nobody. And, and at the end of the seventies, no one wanted to own equities. So I just view the 60 40 portfolio as, kind of a, a lumbering attempt at diversification that has a rear view mirror looking back 20, 30 years, that is rosy.

That's the top, top decile performance of what you should expect from that portfolio. And I feel like you give up nothing. By bringing in other asset classes that add a tremendous amount of value because an all weather portfolio is gonna have stocks, it's gonna have bonds, and then it's gonna have these positions in all the risk transfer markets and can hold up a lot better.

In a period like the 1970s, which is really from 68 to 82, it was 14 years of pain for people that were passive stock and bond investors. So I just look at it and say they're taking risk. That's uncompensated. So I agree with, with BlackRock that a 64 40 portfolio is not a great bet, simply because the comparisons are tough and you at a Goldilocks period, and people's expectations are, are way too high.

But I can't tell you what 60 40 is gonna do going forward. I just feel like it's incomplete and it's not the greatest bet on the planet. You know, I love Morgan Housel's idea. I'm gonna misquote it somewhat, but it's effectively like, your lifetime, accounts for. 0.001% of history but it accounts for 99.9% of how you think about history.

And so if you look at the average financial advisor, the average financial advisor is the 60-year-old man, right? So a 60-year-old advisor who's lived through. A period of incredible performance for bonds. Right. And a 60 40 has been a wonderful thing to do for a long, long time.

But I think, we have to become students of history and we have to come market historians and know that, what got us here may not get us there. And to think, more expansively about what the future might look like if conditions change. And, and it seems like in some ways they have.

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