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On today’s Intelligent Money Minute, we’ll interview Larry Swedroe on how diversification is like a U.S. road trip. Larry begins by stating that in a world of uncertainty, diversification is the only prudent strategy. No one can know the future; therefore, it is wise to diversify across various sources of risks and returns. Larry continues by making the comparison of diversification to a U.S. road trip from New York to San Francisco. Imagine that in each leg of your trip you only travel half of the remaining distance. You are getting closer to, but not completely arriving at your destination. Each leg adds less distance.
Diversification works in the same way. The most important diversification is the addition of the right amount of fixed income to dampen the risk of the overall portfolio. This gets you halfway across the country. From here, each “leg” adds less value, but you’ve already gone almost the whole distance. Larry notes that typically 8-10 mutual funds are, at most, all you will need.
At Intelligent Investing, we strongly believe in diversification. We believe that it may not be best to own one thing to make a killing in it. However, by doing so, this may prevent you from not owning enough of any one thing to be able to get killed by it.
We’ll be interviewing Larry on several podcasts regarding markets, passive investing, and diversification, so be sure to subscribe to our Intelligent Money Minute podcasts.
Larry was among the first authors to publish a book that explained the science of investing in layman’s terms, “The Only Guide to a Winning Investment Strategy You’ll Ever Need.” He has since authored seven more books.