Chart of the Day: The Everything Portfolio (Part 1)

Today’s Chart of the Day is from an academic paper called “The Risk and Reward of Investing” by Doeswijk and Swinkel published in July 2024. They were able to construct a portfolio valued at $150 trillion (vs. the $32 trillion in the S&P 500 index) which consists of a history of all the investable assets in the world from 1970-2022. Notably, stocks make up approximately 50%, bonds are 42%, real estate is 5%, and commodities are 3%. They then calculated the returns of each asset class, and not surprisingly, the more investments they added, the higher the return and lower the price swings. The author suggests that it is nearly impossible to construct and index like this, but we can get awfully close with the modern, well-diversified funds now available that were not in 1970.