Doing so would defy good investment practice as I understand it. There’s a common school of thought that you should select 5 -10 good “horses” (funds) and ride them. That over diversification (labeled worsification by some) is bad.
But it occurs to me that for one part of a portfolio (around 10-20%) you could do better with less risk than a single fund by cooking up an equally weighted mix of more volatile investments - provided they tend not to run in the same direction. Toss in some stock, bond, currency or commodity CEFs, some ETFs, and even a favorite stock or too. 10 total for simplicity is what I envision. Then rebalance frequently, locking in short term profits and adding to the ones that have fallen. And if you find you have a rotten egg in there, swap it out for something else which shouldn’t be a problem owing to its relatively small weighting in the portfolio..
The big drawbacks of a couple decades ago aren’t so serious. You don’t need to use OEFs with their trade restrictions, Trades are free now at most brokerages. Up to the minute tracking is possible with good apps. The one drawback would be spreads - but a price worth paying perhaps.
Haven’t implemented this. Threw together an hypothetical portfolio I intend to watch and hopefully learn from,
Anybody doing this?
Comments
I now let the folks at Avantis take care of that for me using AVGE. I do hold certain CEF's, BDC's and dividend paying bluechips but they're more for the income produced than any other reason.
I haven't heard much about them, but it sounds tempting to try to create your own custom built vehicle - a basket of ETFs and/or stocks (but no Mutual funds).
I doubt Fido generates a daily NAV for your basket, so it's likely just a segregated batch of securities that can be easily re-balanced.
I select the best risk/reward up to 5 funds within top 1-2 categories for my criteria and keep changing. Then, every fund must be in the top 20-30%. Risk control is a lot more important to me.
The more money I have and the best I got, I started using only 2-3 funds.
Stocks: 1995-2000 + after 2010 = mostly LC tilting growth. 2000-2010=Value, SC, International.
Bonds: Preparing for retirement, PIMIX was my first bond fund. I started investing in it in 2010 and it grew to over 50% until I sold it in 01/2018.
Basically, I modeled it after basketball, a game that I played over 4 decades. As a coach, you want to go to the playoffs every year. Winning isn't a guarantee. Why would someone hold value when growth is so much better for many years?
You play your best 5 players every time. Superstars play more, and you give them more rope. A superstar isn't guaranteed. You want to play your best 5 at any moment. You can't have a bad player on the court.
All my funds must perform well within their category. Reliability is worth a lot. I don't play with emotion. A bad fund must be replaced. It gets very easy over the years.
I never diversified since the first day I started investing. Diversification = I must have LC,SC,value,growth,international and others. If US LC does well, it's the easiest to make money. If it doesn't, you diversify more.
What's the catch? when and how to replace funds. That takes discipline and a lot of experience. You can't learn swimming by reading a book. My goals have changed too and that changed my trading too.
Exceptions exist: every several years you find funds/managers that beat the odds. Think PRWCX,PIMIX for many years; I held SGIIX,FAIRX,OAKBX for 8+ years during 2000-10. Some managers do great in specific markets.
Not what I’m considering. Just a group of 10 I would trade in and out of (frequent rebalancing) in an attempt to do better than the conservative global allocation “fund of funds” they’d replace. Some would be quite volatile, but combined they would probably have similar risk. No doubt it would require more time and effort than just hanging on to a single fund.
Thanks @JD_co for the mention of Fidelity’s “Do-it-yourself” basket of funds. Just when I thought there was: nothing new under the sun.
Still feel like a new kid on the block having had a brokerage account for only 4-5 years. Some interesting new ways to make and loose money.
Rather then benchmarking for return, I’m looking to hold combined daily volatility below that of GAA - the etf I sold to fund these CEFs. Personally, even short-term volatility is hard to take. In terms of return - hope to do better over time than GAA would have. Also tilted a little in the direction of Asia / Japan. By most accounts the Yen is a bargain.
REMIX is a mutual fund that allocates to different ETFs.
I cannot locate many others, but if anybody knows of a list for mutual fund FOFs, kindly share.
FOF are more popular in the private equity/hedge fund world, where only accredited investors can dabble.
VGSTX is unique in that its top level ER is 0%.
Funds/ETFs of CEFs have high ERs because CEFs themselves have high ERs due to leverage. For example, PCEF has top level ER of 0.50%, but the total ER 3.07%. The SEC requires funds to include costs of leverage in the ERs.
(I'm a successful threes shooter --- on the court but only there. Off-court, have had to restrain myself to look for layups.)
But if you don't want to forget about it, I like FD1000's approach.
Stick to just a few mutual funds ... like two or three ... no more than five! Almost all, by definition, are diversified.
On those exceptions ... one would have done well with: OAKBX, VWELX, VWINX in the 2000's. Just great balanced funds for their time ... if not for a lifetime. Of course, that's ex-post.
So you have no real argument from me. However, if everyone took your sage advice and split their portfolios 50/50 between DODIX & DODGX nearly the entire financial / fund industry would have to close their doors. - Musk on steroids.
My entire portfolio includes 10 mutual funds/ETFs, 1 individual stock, and 5-Year TIPS purchased at auction.
No account has more than two funds (excluding money market funds) except for one taxable account.
Reducing the portfolio's total number of positions to 5 or 6 (excluding money market funds)
is appealing although there is no "magic number."