Strategic Allocation

How many stocks are enough for the long-term investor to diversify stock-picking risks? Conventional wisdom says that 8 to 20 stocks are enough. In their recent paper entitled “Diversification in Portfolios of Individual Stocks: 100 Stocks Are Not Enough”, Dale Domian, David Louton and Marie Racine examine the risk that long-term buy-and-hold stock portfolios will fall short of some minimum return goal. They use portfolios of different sizes constructed from a real sample of 1,000 U.S. stocks (the 100 largest by market capitalization in each of 10 industries) over the 20-year period from January 1985 through December 2004, inserting comparable replacements for the hundreds of delistings that occur in the sample (mostly due to mergers). They find that: Keep Reading