To invest is to go out on a limb

Investing is an act carried out mostly in faith. We can look at hundreds of different data points or read dozens of books and research papers. But none of that—literally none of that—can guarantee anything about the future.

Any asset we pick, any strategy we pick—there will be a dozen arguments supporting them and a dozen opposing them. Which arguments should we accept and which ones should we ignore?

We have to go out on a limb and make our bets. We may get the returns we wanted, or we may not. The risks we took great care to avoid may play out, or they may not. If the risks play out, we get to feel smart; if they don’t, we get to look like fools for not getting on the bandwagon.

Investing is a humbling exercise. It shows us how powerless we are. It’s also an empowering exercise. It forces us to march on even when the path is dark and our legs trembling.

Picture by Caio Triana from Negative Space

Being aware of emotions

The good news is that awareness is a significant half of the solution. Knowing how and when we allow emotions to hijack us is the first step towards a solution.

The bad news is that awareness is only half the solution. When I become aware that I am acting in anger, I am usually left puzzled about what to do next. I need to pause and reconsider the situation to decide on a response. Sometimes there is just nothing for me to do, i.e., the situation is simply beyond my control.

As someone who used to get hijacked by emotions on a regular basis, this awareness is making me uncomfortable. I am still figuring out how to deal with it. I suppose I should be proud, but I don’t feel that way yet… I am still confused. 😅

Emotions hijack us

This happens often. I am in the process of doing something, but a seemingly stupid thing prevents me from doing it. I become angry. That “stupid thing” may be a broken tool or someone’s inexplicable policy or someone not living up to my expectations. Essentially, something that is not in my control blocks me.

Often, this enrages me. I go on the offensive and my focus turns into hurting or humiliating this entity or person whom I am upset with. Naturally, I forget about my original goal. Hurting/humiliating becomes the priority now.

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio

But angry responses seldom help. People are more likely to cooperate when I am nice than when I am yelling at them. I cannot persuade an inanimate tool by being nice, but being angry is no better. If I shifted my focus to what I want to accomplish rather than cursing the broken tool, I’ll likely come up with an alternate solution.

Emotions hijack us. We should avoid getting hijacked. When we unconsciously allow ourselves to be hijacked, we should be flexible/humble/honest enough to drop the emotion and course correct.

‘Anchoring bias’ in investing

Anchoring Bias is when we anchor ourselves to an old piece of information or to a state of the world that is not real. In this post, I’ll go over a few examples of anchoring bias that I have come across. The goal is to make you, the reader, and me, the writer, aware enough to spot such a bias when we come across it in future.

Anchoring to a specific rate of growth

Someone posted on Reddit that their portfolio XIRR had come down. Though this user had already met their savings target, many Reddit users were advising them to sell their mutual fund holdings only after the XIRR rises back to a reasonable number.

Let’s say we invest expecting a return of 11%. The market is good, and it gives us 17% return until a few months before we plan to cash out. We feel great. But the market sentiment changes suddenly and the rate of growth falters to 12%. If we wait for the growth rate to pick back up to 14 or 15%, then we are anchoring to a specific rate of return. 12% is still better than the expected 11%, so it’s better to follow the original plan and cash out now. Waiting for the value to go up is anchoring bias.

Let’s say I expected to amass ₹5,00,000 from my investments. The investment value becomes ₹7,80,000 one day, but soon falls down to ₹6,10,000. If I cash out now, I still have ₹1,10,000 surplus. If I stay invested, the value may go up to ₹6,80,000 or it may fall further to ₹4,50,000.

Anchoring to the acquisition price

I receive RSUs (restricted stock units) from my employer as a part of my compensation. A recent batch of RSUs vested at the price of $197.57. This was particularly high as the share had seen an uprise in the few days before the vesting date. When the newly vested shares were deposited into my account (T+2 days), the shares were trading at around $191.50.

I sell newly vested RSUs pretty much immediately, but this time I hesitated to sell the shares because the price had fallen.

I didn’t have any specific valuation in mind for these stocks. All I knew was that the price was now lower than it was at the time of vesting. Had the shares vested at $191, I would have gladly sold them for $191.50. My hesitation was only because I was anchoring to the vesting price.

Anchoring to a recent high

I was planning to sell a large number of my old RSUs this month (February 2025) because holding US assets is a bad idea. The price of the shares went up significantly in January, but I couldn’t sell then as the trading window was closed. I could sell in February, but the recent fall in the stock price made me hesitate.

The price of my RSUs has fallen by 5.74% in the trailing month

I lamented the ~6% fall in the past month, but I didn’t consider that the price was up by over 10% in the past 6 months even after the recent fall!

The price of my RSUs has risen by 10.62% in the trailing 6 months period

I was so anchored to the price movement in the past month that I had lost sight of how good the price still was.

Anchoring to tax rules of the past

Tax for gains from bond mutual funds went up significantly on 1-April-2023. Since then, I kept looking for “bond like” mutual funds that are taxed better. It took me close to 2 years to see that “bond like” mutual funds aren’t all that good. I was anchoring to a tax rate that was no longer available.

The impact of anchoring bias

If you are thinking, “What’s the big deal? Investors are humans too, and this is how typical humans behave,” you are right. But you need to be slightly better than typical humans to be a successful investor.

Before we start investing, we make an investment plan considering the risks and rewards. We are usually equanimous while we make the plan. What do we do when a bias gets the better of us? We change the plan on the fly. We dance to the tune of the market. That is not how investing success is achieved.

Modifying the plan mid-way is not a problem in itself. We often need to tweak our plans as we go along. But such changes should be holistic updates done without fear or excitement. Changing course solely based on market movement, arbitrarily changing asset allocation based on market sentiment, etc. don’t usually lead to anything good.

Conclusion

I don’t think it’s practically possible to eliminate all biases. But being cognizant of our biases can help us make better decisions. The ability to avoid biases can often be the difference between a good investor and a mediocre one.

Why you should avoid active mutual funds

The biggest reason I recommend against actively managed mutual funds is that most investors have a time horizon much longer than any AMC’s or the fund manager’s.

Assuming you start investing when you’re 40 and you live up to 80, your retirement portfolio has a lifespan of 40 years. Quite a few people will have portfolios with a longer time frame. Many would start investing at a younger age; many would want the retirement corpus to last for an additional decade or more. A lifespan of 50 or 60 years for a retirement corpus is not unusual.

It’s fairly easy to shortlist active funds that are great today. There’s a reasonable chance that these funds will stay good for the next 10 or 20 years. But change is inevitable. AMCs change hands; fund managers switch jobs; fund managers retire; investing landscape changes; regulations change. In a constantly changing world, it’s impossible to tell which of today’s top active funds will remain good 30, 40, 50 years from now.

A passively managed portfolio will never give you amazing, market beating returns, but the characteristics of such a portfolio won’t dramatically change later on. Anyone that likes a predictable portfolio over an unpredictable one should seriously consider passive management. (This is predictability relative to the market. A passive portfolio that replicates the market will always have the same amount of risk and return as the market itself. The risk and return of active portfolios can drift in either direction.)

While that’s my stance in general, I still use and recommend some actively managed funds. They are often hybrid or multi-asset funds that can act like “one fund portfolios” (meaning that’s the only fund you have in the entire portfolio).

• I use such funds to hold cash for a short duration (such as a few years). 
• I also recommend such funds to people who wouldn’t get any equity exposure otherwise. The chosen active fund may not be the best available, but if it’ll generate more return than a bank deposit. That’s often good enough.

The case for investing in NPS

I used to strongly recommend against NPS (National Pension System) because it doesn’t offer much flexibility to investors. It took me a while, but I eventually understood that NPS is a mass market product, and hence, it needs to account for the quirks of the “common people”. Recently I came across a few news stories that confirmed this.

News story 1: A vegetable vendor named Pradipkumar Vaishya has invested ₹4.55 crores in a Ponzi scheme called Torres. Reportedly, this capital belonged to him and others who invested through him. Torres shut down, taking with it many crores of rupees from investors like Pradipkumar Vaishya.

News story 2: A retiree has invested his entire life savings in an invoice discounting platform. He lost all his money when the firm shut down without notice. Many other investors have lost their capital too.

When looking at all this, it makes sense that NPS forbids people from squandering their retirement corpus. If falling for outright scams is one way to lose money, making emotional decisions is another.

You retire with a corpus that looks huge (but in reality it may be just enough to keep up with inflation). Someone in your family wants to borrow 10 or 15% of your corpus for some need. You think you have more than enough, so you lend it to them. They are never able to return the money. Inflation does its thing, and you are penniless in your final years. Or, maybe the borrower returns the capital without interest after 10 odd years, and you have lost a significant amount of interest that could have somewhat bridged the gap between inflation and your corpus.

A typical “common person” in our society is not good with money management. They are especially bad when it comes to living for a few decades off a corpus. Living off a corpus is a qualitatively different skill than managing one’s expenses with regular (or even irregular) cash inflow. Life doesn’t prepare us for it; we need to figure it out after we have retired. The vast majority of us will make mistakes. Some (many?) mistakes can have irreversible negative impact. It is an extremely hard problem.

NPS acknowledges this challenge and forces people to take a monthly pension. Even if the investor squanders all the money they have access to, the pension corpus stays intact and they’ll continue to receive some monthly cash flow.

I have strong opinions about how to invest my money. You—someone reading a blog post like this—also likely have strong opinions. NPS is most likely incompatible with our ideas and goals, so NPS is probably not a good fit for us. But we are outliers. For most people, NPS is a fine choice.

Holding RSUs because ‘they are there’

It is said that George Mallory, an English climber, was planning to climb Mount Everest for the third time. A reporter asked him why George Mallory wanted to climb again, and his reply was, “Because it’s there.” He wanted to climb the mountain because it was there.

Similarly, employees who receive RSU shares of their employer companies hold on to those shares. Ask a Microsoft employee if they want to hold Amazon.com shares. They’ll say No, but they’ll continue to hold their Microsoft shares. Ask a Facebook employee if they want to hold Walmart shares. They’ll say No, but they’ll continue to hold their Facebook shares.

These shares are held by those employees not as investments, but merely because “they are there” in their RSU accounts. If you are holding onto RSU shares of your present or past employer, ask yourself whether you are holding them because they are there or because you have a well thought out reason to hold them.

Correlation of assets in my portfolio

My investment portfolio has 4 assets: global equity, Indian equity, Indian bonds, and gold. I didn’t put this portfolio together myself; my financial advisor recommended this to me. I hesitantly took his recommendation because I couldn’t tell how good/bad this portfolio mix was.

I have been learning about portfolio construction for the past few months. As I learn about portfolio construction, I keep evaluating this portfolio—and I see that this is a great portfolio.

Recently, I have been thinking about asset correlation and how uncorrelated or negatively correlated assets make up resilient portfolios. Naturally, I checked the correlation of the assets in my portfolio. This is what I got, and as you can see, +0.3 is the worst correlation.

	US equity	Sensex	ABSL income
US equity	-
Sensex	0.3042	-
ABSL income	-0.2025	-0.4045	-
Gold	-0.4006	0.0400	0.0784

Notes about the data used to calculate the correlation. I couldn’t get data for the very specific assets I am investing in, so I used substitute data where necessary.

• I got US equity return data from the ‘Toolkit’ spreadsheet of portfoliocharts.com. This is the substitute for global equity data.
• For Indian equity, I am using Sensex data. I invest in a much broader index than Sensex, but this was the data I could get.
• I couldn’t get Indian bond return data, so I used the NAV history of the oldest debt fund, ABSL Income fund.
• The correlation is calculated based on their calendar year returns from 1996 through 2023.

Are “debt like” mutual funds better than pure debt funds?

Many thanks to Sayan Sircar for helping me understand many concepts that led me to eventually write this blog post.

Ever since the Indian government decided to tax debt mutual fund gains at the slab rate, I have been struggling to decide on a course of action. My initial intuition was that we should invest in the chosen assets and not worry about taxes. Then I changed my mind and I was attracted towards “debt like” funds that invest a significant portion of the capital in arbitrage.

But I had a constant nagging in the back of my mind because:

1. Arbitrage is constant work (for the fund management team) while debt funds are not as much work. I like the passive style of investing where “buy and hold” is the norm.
2. Arbitrage may not make as much money in bear markets (since futures may not sell at a good premium).

Arbitrage behaves differently than bonds, and I don’t exactly want arbitrage in my long-term portfolio. Until today, this was mostly intuition, but now I have some data to back it up. To make sense of that data, we must first understand correlation.

A primer on correlation

Correlation quantifies how 2 different investment assets behave relative to each other. A correlation of 0 means uncorrelated. When one asset’s movement doesn’t affect the other, we say they are uncorrelated. Cash is uncorrelated with all other asset classes.

Positive correlation means the assets move in the same direction; negative correlation means the assets move in opposite directions. We don’t want the correlation to be close to +1.0, which means the 2 asset classes behave mostly the same. That means there is no effective diversification.

A correlation close to -1.0 means the 2 asset classes cancel each other’s appreciation and we’d often end up with net zero return. This may sound unappealing, but rebalancing such a portfolio can be very rewarding. (In other words, such portfolios offer high rebalancing bonuses.)

Correlation between a few Indian mutual fund categories

I tried to get data for a few decades, but my attempts failed. ValueResearch provides calendar year returns for the last 9 years (2016 through 2024) at the fund category level. 9 years is not a long time period, but this is probably okay since this period includes both low and high interest rate markets. One interest rate cycle is better than zero! 😅

The correlation between mutual fund categories are shown in the following table.

Large cap : Arbitrage	-0.0312
Flexicap : Arbitrage	-0.0114
Large cap : Liquid	-0.2562
Flexicap : Liquid	-0.2593
Large cap : Short duration	-0.1700
Flexicap : Short duration	-0.1264
Large cap : 10-year gilts	-0.3884
Flexicap : 10-year gilts	-0.3740
Large cap : Dynamic bond	-0.3593
Flexicap : Dynamic bond	-0.3017

I had the intuition that arbitrage was similar to cash. The data confirms my intuition since arbitrage has a correlation (with equity) very close to 0. Shorter duration debt funds have correlation closer to -0.25 while longer duration debt funds have correlation closer to -0.4. (The Short Duration category falling between liquid and arbitrage is probably an anomaly caused by the small sample size of data we are working with.)

This is the metric I had to see to convince myself that pure bond funds are a better asset class to mix with equity. The lower correlation with equity means that an equity+bonds portfolio will have lower drawdowns than an equity+arbitrage portfolio.

My recent analysis quantified that the difference in post-tax growth rate is in the range of 0.5% to 1.5% annually. The difference in growth rate reduces as the holding period gets longer and longer. If we assume that a dynamic bond fund returns 0.5% more on average than an arbitrage+bond fund, then the net corpus won’t be very different between the 2 options.

Conclusion

1. Bonds, especially longer duration bonds, are a good asset to mix with equity. While arbitrage behaves like cash, bonds can provide meaningful downside protection (and provide meaningful rebalancing bonus).
2. For holding periods of 2 or more decades, the post-tax growth rate of bond funds is not too far from the post-tax growth rate of arbitrage+bond funds (source).
3. If we hold longer duration bond funds (such as dynamic bond funds), it is not unreasonable to expect that they’d yield 0.5% more return than arbitrage+bond funds. This further diminishes the difference in post-tax return.

The impact of “taxed at slab” — Take 3

I had quantified the difference between 30% tax and 12.5% tax—i.e., tax payable for bond fund gains vs tax payable for arbitrage+bond fund gains. The result of that previous analysis tilted in favour of paying less tax. The longer the holding period, the higher the impact of tax.

In a way, that analysis simply quantified what was already obvious. It is a well known fact that the gain (or value appreciation) increases exponentially as the holding period increases. The tax difference is flat 17.5% (30% – 12.5% = 17.5%). A flat percentage on a larger number will of course be larger than the same percentage on a smaller number. There wasn’t anything new to learn there other than quantifying what we can already know intuitively.

Now I want to measure the impact of tax differently, this time controlling for the exponential growth caused by longer holding periods. What if we calculated the CAGR of post-tax returns? That is, use a fixed pre-tax growth rate, compute the final corpus value, deduct estimated tax, and calculate the CAGR from original corpus to post-tax corpus.

When I do this, 2 things become noticeable:

1. The difference falls roughly in the 0.5% to 1.5% growth rate.
2. The longer the holding period, the lesser the impact on the growth rate. When I ran my previous analysis (i.e., take 2), this is what I expected to see, but I saw the opposite. It’s good to finally see data that validates my intuition.

Each cell in the following tables shows the post-tax growth rate. For example, look at the 6.5% row in the “3 years” table. This row says that if the pre-tax growth is 6.5%, the effective post-tax growth is 5.73% annualised when the tax rate is 12.5% and 4.63% if the tax rate is 30%. By paying higher tax, our investments (effectively) grow 1.1% more slowly each year.

For a holding period of 3 years, the difference in growth rate is 1.1%. If we extend the holding period to 10 years, the difference narrows to 0.96% (per annum). For 20 years, the gap reduces further to 0.78%.

But sensible readers would say that growth rates can go to hell. What really matters is the size of the final corpus, and hence, take 2 is a more useful analysis than this one. They’d be right, except the mutual funds that are taxed at 12.5% come with caveats.

An arbitrage+bond fund behaves differently than a pure bond fund. For some investors, the change in behaviour may not matter. But if the difference matters to you, you shouldn’t feel too bad about paying 30% tax. The impact of tax reduces as you hold the assets for longer and longer.

My conclusion is that long-term investors who plan on holding their investments for 2 or more decades can use this data to rationalise holding pure bond funds. This analysis doesn’t magically reduce the tax we pay, but it changes the narrative to convince oneself to choose a simpler investment asset (pure bond) over a more complex one (arbitrage+bonds).

Num of years ➡	3 years
Growth rate⬇ / Tax rate ➡	12.5%	30.0%	Growth rate Δ
4.5%	3.96%	3.19%	0.77%
5.0%	4.40%	3.55%	0.85%
5.5%	4.84%	3.91%	0.93%
6.0%	5.29%	4.27%	1.01%
6.5%	5.73%	4.63%	1.10%
7.0%	6.17%	5.00%	1.18%
7.5%	6.62%	5.36%	1.26%
8.0%	7.06%	5.73%	1.34%
8.5%	7.51%	6.09%	1.42%
9.0%	7.96%	6.46%	1.50%

Num of years ➡	5 years
Growth rate⬇ / Tax rate ➡	12.5%	30.0%	Growth rate Δ
4.5%	3.98%	3.23%	0.75%
5.0%	4.43%	3.60%	0.83%
5.5%	4.87%	3.97%	0.90%
6.0%	5.32%	4.34%	0.98%
6.5%	5.77%	4.72%	1.06%
7.0%	6.22%	5.09%	1.13%
7.5%	6.67%	5.47%	1.20%
8.0%	7.12%	5.85%	1.28%
8.5%	7.58%	6.23%	1.35%
9.0%	8.03%	6.61%	1.42%

Num of years ➡	10 years
Growth rate⬇ / Tax rate ➡	12.5%	30.0%	Growth rate Δ
4.5%	4.03%	3.33%	0.70%
5.0%	4.48%	3.72%	0.77%
5.5%	4.94%	4.11%	0.83%
6.0%	5.40%	4.50%	0.90%
6.5%	5.86%	4.90%	0.96%
7.0%	6.32%	5.31%	1.02%
7.5%	6.79%	5.71%	1.08%
8.0%	7.25%	6.12%	1.13%
8.5%	7.72%	6.53%	1.19%
9.0%	8.19%	6.95%	1.24%

Num of years ➡	15 years
Growth rate⬇ / Tax rate ➡	12.5%	30.0%	Growth rate Δ
4.5%	4.07%	3.41%	0.65%
5.0%	4.53%	3.82%	0.71%
5.5%	5.00%	4.23%	0.76%
6.0%	5.47%	4.65%	0.82%
6.5%	5.94%	5.07%	0.87%
7.0%	6.41%	5.50%	0.91%
7.5%	6.88%	5.92%	0.96%
8.0%	7.36%	6.36%	1.00%
8.5%	7.83%	6.79%	1.04%
9.0%	8.31%	7.23%	1.08%

Num of years ➡	20 years
Growth rate⬇ / Tax rate ➡	12.5%	30.0%	Growth rate Δ
4.5%	4.10%	3.50%	0.61%
5.0%	4.58%	3.92%	0.66%
5.5%	5.05%	4.35%	0.70%
6.0%	5.52%	4.78%	0.74%
6.5%	6.00%	5.22%	0.78%
7.0%	6.48%	5.66%	0.82%
7.5%	6.96%	6.11%	0.85%
8.0%	7.44%	6.56%	0.88%
8.5%	7.93%	7.01%	0.91%
9.0%	8.41%	7.47%	0.94%

Num of years ➡	25 years
Growth rate⬇ / Tax rate ➡	12.5%	30.0%	Growth rate Δ
4.5%	4.14%	3.57%	0.57%
5.0%	4.61%	4.01%	0.61%
5.5%	5.09%	4.45%	0.64%
6.0%	5.57%	4.90%	0.68%
6.5%	6.06%	5.35%	0.71%
7.0%	6.54%	5.81%	0.74%
7.5%	7.03%	6.27%	0.76%
8.0%	7.51%	6.73%	0.78%
8.5%	8.00%	7.20%	0.81%
9.0%	8.49%	7.66%	0.83%

Num of years ➡	30 years
Growth rate⬇ / Tax rate ➡	12.5%	30.0%	Growth rate Δ
4.5%	4.17%	3.64%	0.53%
5.0%	4.65%	4.09%	0.56%
5.5%	5.13%	4.54%	0.59%
6.0%	5.62%	5.00%	0.62%
6.5%	6.10%	5.46%	0.64%
7.0%	6.59%	5.93%	0.66%
7.5%	7.08%	6.40%	0.68%
8.0%	7.57%	6.87%	0.70%
8.5%	8.06%	7.35%	0.71%
9.0%	8.55%	7.83%	0.73%

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.