Lazy Portfolios returns can appear attractive, in a world where people usually lose their money in markets.
The good news are that the returns you can see in this website are real, and you can obtain them with a simple asset allocation with ETFs.
The bad news is that it might be not so easy to gain the expected money, if you don’t understand exactly which is the best portfolio for you and you don’t follow the investment strategy.
Choose the best Lazy Portfolio for you
When you decide to follow the asset allocation of a Lazy Portfolio, you must be aware of the time horizon of your investment.
If you can keep your portfolio invested for a very long time, probably the best choice for you would be a portfolio with a larger quote of stocks.
Otherwise, if your time horizon is very short, you must prefer portfolio composed mostly by bonds (short-term bonds possibly).
Most of the Lazy Portfolios are composed by different assets, that can perform in uncorrelated way during the various market phases. This can mitigate risks, but it couldn’t be enough to save your money in the short-term if you choose a high-risk portfolio (i.e. a portfolio composed mostly by stocks).
Buy low cost investments funds
The costs are the only sure thing of your investment. You can’t be sure that you will have a return for sure, but you can bet that costs and fees will erode your future gains for sure.
For this reason, you must choose low cost investments funds. One of the best choice is to buy ETFs (Exchange-traded funds).
An ETF holds assets such as stocks, commodities, or bonds and generally operates with an arbitrage mechanism designed to keep it trading close to its net asset value, although deviations can occasionally occur. Most ETFs track an index, such as a stock or bond or commodity index.
For example, an ETF that replicates the Total US Stock Market hold each single stock of the US Market. With only one investment, you can hold all the market. And all of this, with a ridiculous annual cost.
In this website, for each portfolio, you can find the ETFs that can be used to replicate its asset allocation. All the portfolio returns refer to investments in US Dollars.
If you are a US investor
If you want to implement your Lazy Portfolio, you can follow its asset allocation, buying the ETFs shown in this website, or the ETFs that you prefer. Just be sure to choose ETFs that replicates the right indexes.
Replicating foreign or global indexes (e.g. Emerging Market stocks, European stocks, and so on), you will have a currency risk, anyway.
If you are not a US investor
In this case, if your currency is not the US Dollar, your investment would be subjected to a currency risk.
You can implement different strategies:
- Choose ETFs which replicate the same US indexes, but with a hedging of your domestic currency
- Choose ETFs which replicate the corresponding domestic indexes, in your currency
- Choose USD-based ETFs, conscious that the currency risk can erode performances in your domestic currency, even significantly
Rebalance your portfolio
In order to keep risk under control, you should rebalance assets quotes from time to time, so to keep them at the original percentage of the asset allocation.
It’s enough to rebalance the portfolio yearly. All the returns you can find in this websites are calculated on the hypothesis of a yearly rebalancing (at the end of the year).
If you don’t rebalance your portfolio, because of the so-called allocation-drift, the percentage of your assets will diverge from the initial values, through the years. Usually, after several years without rebalancing, the stocks component becomes predominant.
Disclaimer
The information contained herein does not constitute the provision of investment advice.
