A portfolio is a stack of ideas. Most of them are not worth holding.

I measured the ideas people bolt onto a portfolio, inside a whole portfolio rather than on their own. Here are the four I would hold. Each one contains the one before it; the fourth takes the third and cuts the stock share. You choose where to stop.

Portfolio 1

One fund, held well

The whole world's stock market in a single fund, in its cheapest form, in the right account, and never traded.

VT 100%

Fee a year: 0.06%
Worst stretch: −52.7%
How sure: Settled

Cheap US and international mix, 1990 to 2026

Portfolio 2

A lean toward value

Six funds that lean toward cheaper, smaller, more profitable companies.

VTI 49% VXUS 16% VTV 15% AVDV 10% IDMO 5% AVES 5%

Fee a year: 0.09%
Worst stretch: −54.3%
How sure: Probably

Cheap US stocks against the whole market, over 17.7 years since 2008 and still behind

Portfolio 3

The same, plus trend

The value lean, plus a fund that adds a trend-following program on top of its stocks.

RSST 30% VTI 19% VXUS 16% VTV 15% AVDV 10% IDMO 5% AVES 5%

Fee a year: 0.38%
Worst stretch: −50.3%
How sure: Too close to call

1990 to 2026, with RSST at 25%

Portfolio 4

The cautious version

Portfolio three with the stock share cut and the rest in TIPS, for someone who would sell after a fall of about 30% or 40%.

SCHP 50% TIPS RSST 15% VTI 9.6% VXUS 8% VTV 7.5% AVDV 5% IDMO 2.5% AVES 2.5%

Fee a year: 0.20%
Worst stretch: −18.1%
How sure: Too close to call

1990 to 2026; 54% across 1929 to 1932

If you want one answer

Portfolio two is for someone who wants a lean with a long record and can accept trailing the market for a decade or more. Portfolio three is the ambitious one. Its extra fund is under three years old, and I cannot yet tell whether it will earn its fee. The case for it rests on 96 years of a trend-following series that did not exist as a fund for most of that time. Portfolio four is portfolio three with half or more of the money in inflation-protected Treasury bonds, and it is measured on the same histories: a fall of 16% to 18% since 1990, and 42% to 54% across 1929 to 1932.

Why fees and accounts come first

The cheapest fund with the same holdings beats the dearer one by exactly the fee gap, every year, with no luck involved. Moving from a typical active fund to an index fund saves about 0.49% a year, and nothing else on this site is that certain. Where you hold a fund matters almost as much as which fund: the average US stock fund in a taxable account costs its owner about 1.12% a year in tax, more than most funds charge in fees.

That is why portfolio one comes before any clever idea. The ideas in portfolios two, three and four are worth less than the fee gap and take decades to confirm. They are bets, and each page says how big and how sure.

What I measured

Every idea people add to a portfolio, cheaper funds, gold, bitcoin, the 200-day rule, crash insurance and more, gets a verdict on the strategies page. The verdict is about the idea inside a whole portfolio, because some ideas that look poor on their own help when added on top of stocks, and some that look good on their own make the whole thing worse. Every fund I priced is on the funds page, and the which-account tool says where each fund belongs.

Numbers on this site are before tax and after fund costs unless a page says otherwise. What any of them are worth to you depends on what you hold today, so where a result changes with your situation, the page says so and gives the range.

Numbers as of 2026-09-02. Corrections lists anything that changed.