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The week's question
In December 2024, in the thread "Re: BRK: Why Not XOM?", BreckHutHigh asked the members: "What about the long road trips with kids?" This week it is put to everyone again. The button below opens the small thread re-asking it - read what others have said so far, then give your own answer as an ordinary reply.
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Investment Strategies / Mechanical Investing
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Author: mungofitch 🐝🐝🐝 GOLD
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Number: of 6132 
Subject: Re: Beating the market
Date: 07/09/23 3:49 PM
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No. of Recommendations: 12
To allocate between stocks and bonds, I would strongly avoid using negative recent price performance as your indicator for a higher stock allocation, unless you have some new evidence of this working in some nuanced context.

One thought:

It seems to me that, if you have already decided to own just two things (broad stocks and broad bonds, say), then the rational allocation between the two at any given time is a function of your best guess of their forward real returns.
After all, this is the hidden kernel of rational reasoning between the tradition of rebalancing them to a fixed ratio allocation. Own more of what's temporarily cheaper and less of what's temporarily expensive.

For stocks, you'll typically get inflation plus trend earnings growth (usually around 2% a year, though 2.5% recently), plus the dividend yield on purchase date, plus or minus valuation change during your ownership.
Guessing the change in valuation multiple is hard, but you can at least guess...maybe assume that the trend earnings yield in 10 years will be the average in the last 15 or 25 years.
I imagine there are lots of simple guesses that are better than no guess.

For bonds, you'll get the real yield on purchase date minus the default rate.
The nominal yield and time frame are known, so it's just a matter of estimating inflation over the next N years.
The TIPS yield curve can give you a guess that's probably good enough.
In the past, simply using the current trailing year inflation rate was a better guess than ignoring inflation.
Again, any passable guess is probably better than no guess.

Then just allocate between the two based on their relative attractiveness.
It shouldn't be too hard to come up with a relatively sane formula.
If the anticipated real return from the bonds is negative, don't buy any!
I don't think I'd bother at a real expected return of less than 1-2%.
Unlike "fixed ratio" rebalancing schemes, the results from this approach are not particularly dependent on how often you do it.

Most of the world's bonds were trading at negative real yields not long ago. Yet some people were surprised that they had a terrible 2022.
The list of surprised people did not include those people who did their allocation based on anticipated real returns.
Ending now, the real total return return for TLT has been negative for 99% of possible purchase dates in the last 12 years.
Not because prices are random and they recently tanked by chance, but because the bond yields were pretty low on their purchase dates.

Incidentally, there is a case to be made that the stocks/bonds model is passe, as there should be three legs to the tripod: TIPS are as different from bonds as they are from stocks.
They are in effect entirely different asset class because inflation exists, and is unpredictable.

Jim
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