looking at the very few times 100% equity's was not the highest success rate would you want to bet against those odds if you had to ? i know i wouldn't . not that i would be 100% in equity's at retirement but if we had to pick i know which i would choose .
well time will tell us who is right . so far since rates on bonds shifted about 3 months ago bonds , especially long term ones and gold have gotten pummeled .
both TLT and gld are off about 6-7 % since hitting there recent highs . i think this is just the beginning . i think they will just weigh to heavy on equity's as equity's are trying to squeak out gains from here .
profits are falling and are lower than last year and odds are rates increasing will deteriorate that further .
we will likely resemble a tight money scenario or stagflation for a while . not sure how long but nothing i would want to bet gold and long term bonds on at this point . i do not think the gb or pp will do so well .
but time will tell us .
I think we can agree that neither of us wants to be in the GB or PP, although for different reasons. You don't like those portfolios because you think future conditions will not favor gold and long-term treasuries. You may be right about that, but I generally shy away from trying to predict the future. I don't like GB and PP because they were created by data mining, which leads to heavy concentration in a few narrow assets that happened to have performed particularly well over the backtesting period.
But you are simply wrong about 100% equities having the highest success rate. Go run the numbers on cFiresim - it will take you about a minute to use the default $1,000,000 portfolio/4% spend option to run simulations of 100%, 75/25, and 60/40 portfolios. I'll save you the trouble - 75/25 is the winner by a small margin, and 60/40 was essentially equivalent to 100%.
And that's just a simple US equities/total bond split. Go over to portfolio charts where you can throw a bunch of other asset classes into the mix. I'll save you the trouble again - see my post from yesterday - 60/40 did a little better than 100% US equities, the three fund portfolio (US equities, international equities, and bonds) did better still, and a more broadly diversified portfolio did even better, with a SWR that beat 100% equities by 1.3%.
Now one could argue that you shouldn't bet on history repeating itself, and I think that is a valid argument when you are talking about short time frames or specific assets like gold and long-term treasuries. But if multi-decadal historical patterns in broad asset classes have no value, then we are all just pissing in the wind and we may as well allocate our portfolios randomly.