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Portfolio > Portfolio Construction > Investment Strategies

60/40 Portfolio 'Was Never Dead': Vanguard Researcher

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What You Need to Know

  • The allocation has done well by investors over the long term despite weak performance in 2022, Fran Kinniry says.
  • Other mixes, even 20-80, can be the right balance in the right situation.
  • Historically, a small percentage of stocks have generated most U.S. market returns.

The long-popular 60% stocks-40% bonds portfolio remains alive and well and has proved to be successful despite a rough 2022, according to a key Vanguard Group researcher.

When both stocks and bonds tanked in 2022, many analysts pronounced the traditional balanced portfolio dead. But the 60-40 did well in 2023, returning 18% as the market roared back, Morningstar noted recently.

Fran Kinniry, who heads the Vanguard Investment Advisory Research Center, said in a recent interview that last year’s “staggering” return followed a 2022 in which the 60-40 portfolio logged its fifth-worst result.

“So the irony of all that is if you even look at the 3-year, 5-year, 10-year, the 60-40 was never dead,” Kinniry said. “I think people misunderstood that because it did have a bad year in 2022. But even if you look back without last year and look at the long-run return, 3-year, 5-year, 10-year, you would have been well-served owning a balanced portfolio.”

Not that the portfolio must be split along the 60-40 lines, he added.

“I think the danger also is just saying 60-40 because 60-40 is just one asset allocation. That’s not the right asset allocation for all investors,” Kinniry said.

Different Clients, Difference Balancing

Many allocations serve many purposes.

“There’s nothing wrong with 70-30. There’s nothing wrong with 80-20. There’s nothing wrong with 20-80,” Kinniry said. “It really should all go back to what are your clients’ goals, their objectives, their risk tolerance, their time horizon.”

The 60-40 mix, he added, “gets thrown around as if it’s the only portfolio. What we really need to say and what most people should say is a broadly diversified portfolio that rebalances (and is) low cost and stays the course. Whether that’s 20-80 or 80-20, it doesn’t matter.”

 A 20-80 portfolio is “a perfectly good portfolio” for a retired 70- or 80-year-old, Kinniry explained. “And on the other end, a young investor who’s just graduated from college, 60-40 would be too conservative. I think we have to always kind of take the 60-40 with a grain of salt. It really is just one allocation among hundreds of allocations.”

Rather than trying to guess what will happen in a given year, advisors should focus on their clients’ goals, time horizons and risk tolerances, formulate an asset allocation and rebalance to that, Kinniry suggested, a recommendation that reflects Vanguard’s stay-the-course philosophy.

If investors had drawn conclusions from market performance in the first 10 months last year,  “it probably would have been very detrimental,” he said.

Kinniry cited the pitfalls in trying to time the market and warned about the risks involved in underweighting specific stocks — for client portfolios and advisors’ practices.

Research shows that in the long term, it’s hard for active fund managers to beat indexing, “and if that is true, why would it be easy to guess what next year’s return is going to be? It’s not easy. History shows it’s wrong way more than correct. And if you’re an advisor, you really run the risk of getting fired by your client if you guess wrong,” he explained.

He and Investment Advisory Research Center colleagues noted in a recent report that the 15% and 8% stock and bond market returns, respectively, in November and December followed major selloffs in the previous few months, contributing to 25% and 5% full-year returns.

“The unpredictable nature of the markets, characterized by clusters of upward and downward swings, intersects with investors’ rational behaviors such as loss aversion, regret and the fear of missing out,” they wrote.

“Emotions like regret and loss aversion often influence timing decisions, leading investors to sell out when losses occur, which may seem intuitive and appealing. However, it is important to recognize that these decisions can be detrimental, as strong bull market recoveries often follow, leading to subsequent regret and FOMO,” they added.

Risks in Underweighting Stocks

Advisors and clients also should remember that, historically, a small percentage of stocks have generated most U.S. market returns, underscoring the importance of owning the entire market, they noted. From 1926 through 2022, only 72 stocks accounted for half the market’s total returns, according to the Vanguard report.

“As an investor, one way to ensure that you don’t miss out on the potential gains from these top-performing stocks is by owning the entire market. As an advisor, it is crucial to consider the implications of underweighting these stocks as it can result in significant tracking error compared with your clients’ benchmark,” the Vanguard research team warned.

“This tracking error not only puts your clients’ investment goals at risk but also poses a potential threat to your practice,” they said. “The longer and wider the tracking error persists, the higher the likelihood that your clients may not achieve their desired investment outcomes. Additionally, it increases the risk of clients terminating their relationship with your practice.”

Strategic asset allocations are based on long-term considerations: risk, return and relationships across asset classes “which necessitate owning the entire market without selectively underweight specific stocks,” the team wrote.

If an advisor had underweighted the “Magnificent 8” big tech stocks relative to the S&P 500 by only 10% over the past decade — shaving their 30% market cap weight to 27% — the client would have given up 5.4% over the 10 years and about 1.5% or 2% last year, when the companies drove market gains, Kinniry explained.

He recommended “trying your best to tune out what you may hear on the television or what you may read as it relates to having a crystal ball of what’s going to happen in the future.”

While advisors and clients should keep a long-term, stay-the-course mindset, that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t make some shorter-term decisions, Kinniry suggested, noting the significant cash that investors put in money market funds in the past two years.

“I would just ask advisors, do their clients need the amount of money market or cash that they have in the portfolio? And maybe they do. Maybe they have short-term needs for that cash,” he said.

“But if they don’t have the need to spend those assets in the next 12 to 24 months, the question should be, have bonds normalized now? And should they be putting that cash back to work into the longer-term investment program such as the stock and bond market?”

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