When an abundance of information doesn’t help

Conflict of interest is a weird thing. It’s hard to detect and assess. Even when we can see a conflict of interest, it’s difficult to know what the conflict actually means.

When I used to be in the “anti-gold camp” (meaning, when I believed that gold should not be part of investment portfolios), I noticed that everyone that praised gold was also selling investment gold. That’s a clear conflict of interest. But just because someone sells gold, it doesn’t mean they have ulterior motives, right? On the contrary, someone who genuinely likes gold will of course sell it on their platform. (“Shocker! Milk seller thinks that milk is a good food!”)

On the other side of the marketplace we have asset managers boasting their “skin in the game.” Imagine you are asked to fly into enemy territory as a passenger on a fighter plane. The fighter pilot assures you, “I am flying right with you. I would genuinely try to keep us both alive.” The pilot isn’t lying. But taking that flight is a foolish move for most civilians. That the pilot takes the same risk as the passenger is irrelevant.

That means, making sound investment decisions boils down to knowing what you are doing. Investors need to understand the assets they invest in and decide for themselves whether they want to invest in an asset or not, how much they want to invest, etc. Fiduciary advisors can (and do) help, but the investor is the ultimate decision maker.

Academic research can potentially help, but acting based on academic research is also mired in complexity. Who funded the study? What are the researchers’ preconceived biases? Was this a “research” fabricated to prove a point, or was this done with genuine intellectual curiosity? How sound are the data and the methodologies used by the researchers? Most people cannot evaluate these. Even the conclusions of such research studies are beyond many ordinary people’s comprehension. As a result, ordinary people rely on someone else to simplify the study’s conclusion, and we are back to the same problem that we started with.

Thinking about all these reminds me of the phrase, “Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink.” An abundance of information is available to us, and yet, it is so hard to make sound investment decisions.

Photo by Pok Rie

Bollywood movies are like multi-asset portfolios

What is the composition of a typical Indian movie? Some drama or action, but often both. A few songs. A few fight sequences. Some comedy. It’s almost always a mix of everything. Leaving anything out is so uncommon that such a deviation will be talked about whenever such a movie comes out.

Why do movie makers do this? Why do they add everything to the movie even when some elements (such as comedy or fight sequences) are unnecessary for the story? Because movie making is a business, and the producers want to make money. Audiences may not like the hero’s face, but they may come in to see the heroine. Audiences may not like the songs, but they may come in for the comedy. Essentially, the producers are spreading their bets.

This is not very different from multi-asset investment portfolios. We add equity, bonds, gold, and maybe even cash. We add all that to make an “all weather” portfolio that can navigate any and all challenges that may arise in future.

If you are making a movie for one individual person to watch, you can just do what that person would enjoy. If you are making a movie for me, you can rip off songs and fights. Just give me the drama with beautiful imagery and good dialogues, and I am happy. But no one’s making a movie for just one kind of audience; they want to attract as many diverse kinds of people as they can.

Likewise, for any investment duration, there definitely is a single “winner” asset. If we put all our money in that one asset, we’ll come out with the maximum possible gain. Unfortunately, though, we cannot know that asset in advance; we can know it only after our investment duration has passed. So, in preparation for an uncertain future, we spread our bets into multiple asset classes.

Multi-asset portfolios are a compromise by definition. You could also argue that investors choose multi-asset portfolios only when they don’t have conviction in any asset class. I think Warren Buffett has an equity-only portfolio. But most of us aren’t Warren Buffett; multi-asset portfolios are the right choice for ordinary people like you and I.

A portfolio is a composite

No one picks up a bay leaf or a star anise or a cardamom to eat. No one would consider them tasty. However, try making a biryani without them, and you’ll know how critical these spices are to a dish like biryani. It’s cliched, but these spices add up to more than their sum in a dish like biryani.

Photo credit: Gourav Sarkar from Pexels

A diversified investment portfolio is similar. You may not quite like the individual assets on their own, but you may still hold them if an asset combination is more stable or enhances growth.

Back in 2021, I looked at gold in isolation and decided that it wasn’t a great asset to invest in. In 2024, I learnt that 2 risky assets can be combined to make a portfolio that’s less risky than either of those assets! I also learnt how incredible an asset gold is when combined with equity and bonds. These learnings have led to me to change my stance.

I still cannot embrace gold 100% because it’s a speculative asset. Gold investors make money only when other investors are willing to pay a higher price for the same gold. But it’s hard to ignore the stability and growth potential that a tinge of gold adds to a portfolio.

When I think of my portfolio as a composite (that has X% equity, Y% bonds, etc.), it becomes easier to have an allocation to gold—similar to adding bay leaves and star anise to a biryani. The final output, the composite, is more important than the individual ingredients that make up the composite.

Asset Allocation Vectors by Vecteezy

Thinking of portfolios as a cooked food item also makes it clear why regular rebalancing is very important. If your dish has too much salt or too little water, you don’t just ignore it. You intervene. You bring the ingredients back to an acceptable proportion. You don’t let one ingredient spoil the entire dish. The same is true for portfolios: you don’t let one asset become too heavy or too light, lest that one asset spoils the balance of the entire portfolio.

NPS is the iPhone of retirement products

The National Pension System, more popularly known by the abbreviation NPS, is a retirement investment product. The NPS is somewhat like a retirement product that Apple, the American tech company that makes iPhones, would design.

1. NPS gives you controls, but they are so limiting that savvy investors would feel they don’t have much of a control.
2. NPS is opinionated, and makes many decisions for you. When is the earliest you can retire? The system will tell you. How should you use your retirement corpus? The system will tell you.
3. NPS is limited and doesn’t have some options that have been available outside the NPS for several years. Want to invest in an equity index? Not possible. Want to invest in global equity? You can’t do that. Just make peace with what the system gives you.

Quite a few technically savvy people use Apple products too, but it’s not hard to argue that Apple products are designed with “the masses” as their primary user base. NPS is also the same. It’s a retirement product for people who are not money-savvy.

How to think about portfolio rebalancing?

Portfolio rebalancing is an essential portfolio maintenance operation (learn more about rebalancing).

I hear that many investors don’t regularly rebalance their portfolios because rebalancing means booking profits—and booking profits means paying taxes. Rebalancing is also counterintuitive because rebalancing is trimming down exposure to assets that have done well in the recent past and increasing exposure to assets that have not done as well. No one wants to sell their winners to buy more of their losers.

I think such a hesitation to rebalance stems from a lack of understanding. Rather than looking at the portfolio as one unit, the investor likely looks at different asset classes in the portfolio as independent assets.

Think of an investment portfolio with 3 different asset classes. This could be equity + bonds + gold, but it doesn’t really matter which specific assets. A portfolio that contains these assets is like a stool with 3 legs. When one leg grows too tall or shrinks too short, the stool loses balance and collapses. When one asset in the portfolio has an outsized growth or a big fall, your portfolio loses balance.

“Stool” by an unidentified maker from rawpixel.com; licensed under CC0

But stools are a poor analogy. Every stool needs legs that are of equal height, but portfolio assets are often mixed in different proportions. If you don’t like to visualise your portfolio assets as legs of a stool, maybe think of the portfolio as a primitive aeroplane that is balanced using weights attached to its sides. What happens when one weight becomes too heavy or too light? The whole plane loses balance and can fall down. Regularly assessing and readjusting the weights to keep them in the right proportion is crucial to keep the plane stable and flying.

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Using such a mental model helps in 2 ways:

1. It enables us to see the portfolio as one entity rather than as a collection of independent entities.
2. It makes rebalancing less painful, and possibly even satisfying, because your focus is shifted from individual assets or tax bill over to the stability of your portfolio.

Both of these can contribute positively to investing success.