No one portfolio is suitable for all investors and no lifestyle or target date fund has a portfolio that is appropriate for all investors of the same age or projected retirement date. Building a portfolio that is tailored specifically to you is a better way to go.

Some Key Issues to Understand About Yourself:

When designing your own portfolio, you need to take into consideration at least these issues:

Your level of need for current income from your portfolio Your tolerance for volatility based on requirements for capital withdrawals to pay for lifestyle or particular capital needs, such as college tuition Your level of emotional tolerance for portfolio value fluctuation Your ability to replace potential capital losses with earnings from work Your other assets and sources or income, such as rents or pensions Your ability, willingness, available time and self-discipline to research and manage your portfolio’s assets The level of total return you seek and your time horizon ...

One of the principal reasons for asset allocation is risk management. 

Market risk is generally defined as return fluctuation – volatility.  That is different than issue risk (the risk of owning a single stock or bond issue), which includes not only volatility, but also the risk of company bankruptcy or default on bonds.

While most investment professionals understand and take the risk reduction aspect of asset allocation for granted, that is not the case for all investment advisory clients.  We have been asked on more than one occasion, how we know that to be true, and for some evidence of that truth.

There are probably many ways to respond to that question, one of which is with a practical example with real market data.  We have created one such example for this article.

The image below shows the relative weekly return and weekly rate of change of six index investment funds representing six major

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