Q. I saw you use the term risk efficiency in a recent response, and it made me curious. I have a nice little amount in the Thrift Savings Plan now. I don’t think I will be needing it in the future, except to hand down to future heirs, and so have tried to maintain a 70 percent stocks (35 percent C, 15 percent S and 20 percent I), 15 percent F, 15 percent G ratio. I read in a financial magazine (sometime around 2009) that a 70/30 ratio of stocks to bonds and/or cash reduced the risk considerably over a 100 percent stock portfolio, and didn’t reduce returns significantly. Do you agree, or do you have some other thoughts on what is risk-efficient for long-term growth?
A. Risk efficiency is a measure of how close an investment portfolio lies to the “Efficient Frontier” — the set of portfolios that mix assets together in ways that produce the maximum expected rate of return for the level of risk they produce. I can’t tell you how risk-efficient your asset allocation model is, but I’d guess it’s pretty risk efficient. Note that this doesn’t mean that it’s risk-appropriate. The correct asset allocation will be both.
