Well that makes my katzenjammer even worse. On top of a cold, as well as a hangover from trying to match dad — who just landed from Australia — on the shiraz front, my portfolio now lags behind the 60-80 per cent equity index in the table below for the first time this year. As wake-up calls go, less a splash of water on the face and more a slap. I had long ceased hoping to outdrink the S&P 500 in 2024 — the AI boom and strong pound ensured that.
But the trade-off between returns and volatility is terrifying . So yeah, I could own just one stock and be lucky. At the other extreme, an academic paper over the summer by Ronald Doeswijk and Laurens Swinkels — beautifully summarised by my colleagues on Alphaville — proves the value of extreme diversification. Hypothetically a fund owning everything would not only have produced an excess return over cash of 0.