The Gone Fishin' Asset Allocation Model

Investors are often surprised to learn that their most important investment decision is selecting the mix of assets to be held in the portfolio, not selecting the individual investments themselves.

This is asset allocation. It's how you divide your portfolio up among different uncorrelated assets like stocks and bonds.

Stocks give the greatest return over the long haul. But the trade-off is high volatility. The Gone Fishin' Portfolio's asset allocation model, however, is specifically built to match or exceed the return of being fully invested in stocks without enduring the hair-raising volatility of a 100% stock portfolio.

It is designed to be both aggressive enough to boost your long-term returns and uncorrelated enough (to the broad market) to smooth out the inevitable bumps along the way.

In the seven years since its inception, it has done just that, returning 15.5% a year while experiencing less volatility than the S&P 500.

The Gone Fishin' Portfolio is made up of 10 asset classes, which are detailed in the book.