Think this post is supposed to be joke!

Yes @Sven. My post of the classic Geiko caveman commercial was supposed to be a joke. It was meant as a play on the writer’s emphasis on simplicity - “AANA is amazingly simple.”
I was also alluding to what @sma3 noted earlier - also in jest … I have seen several other “simple portfolios” proposed. But if we used them, MFO would collapse!
It’’s widely acknowledged that trading in and out of assets frequently damages portfolios more often than it helps. So from that perspective, these simple portfolios are good approaches in that they help you stay the course. All of the assets included in AANA A do rise in value over time (as measured in multi-decades) due to the corrosive effects of inflation on paper currencies. You would have made money in nominal terms over 50 years with gold, real estate, the S&P 500 and the other components. Rebalancing smooths the ride and hopefully keeps the investor from panicking and selling an asset when it is down. To the contrary, it forces you to sell some of your “winners” and buy more of your “losers” (counterintuitive for many).

I think using your existing ROTH IRA is the way to go because of the 5-year rule withdrawal. If you open a new account, you have to wait 5-years before penalty free withdrawal; your existing Roth IRA is likely older, and get you sooner to penalty free withdrawal (if you ever need a withdrawal).
Hope others will comment, but that's my understanding. In my Fidelity Roth 401(k), I like how Fidelity showed "First Roth Contribution Year" and "First year of withdrawal without penalty *" ------ "*" is for 59 1/2 penalty free withdrawal, so if you are over 59 1/2, then it doesn't really matter.

Thank you. They are very good funds going into 2023.
As for the bonds, 2023 may present better chance to gain 5%+ gain now that most of the rate hike are likely behind us now. Few smaller hikes are likely this year. And the yields are considerable more attractive comparing to the recent years.
Since there is a possibility of a recession, value funds are preferred unless those that have better risk profile their benchmarks in last year’s drawdown.

@TheShadow Yea, I almost put a chunk of money into one of those NFCU 5%s today. Went as far as to login and start the transfer. I bailed remembering previous high percent teasers followed by lower than PenFed type rates when the short period was over. Maybe tomorrow with half the money I was ready to send today. Really wish, after more than 70 years, I could break that procrastinator personality.

Possibly we’ve been all wrong here over the years with all the deep mutual fund analysis, the “What are you Buying and Selling?” threads - all those damn sophisticated charts and what not.

We can have turmoil and crisis but if it will not last for months-years, the global financial system will collapse. If you can't trust MM in Vanguard, Fidelity and Schwab we have a bigger problem. A real crisis would lead to big stock+bond decline, and shutting down trade. We had already
www.investopedia.com/articles/economics/09/money-market-reserve-fund-meltdown.asp
The most important, what should you do now? I don't see any good solution and the ones you think are good, may hurt you even more.
But, if you insist on being afraid, maybe you should buy gold and fill your basement, or maybe you can build an underground stand alone bunker and get all the power from the sun + fill the bunker with food and guns.
It makes me smile when investors worry about something with low chance of happening, AKA, shut down the global financial system...
But, have no problem holding to stocks and losing 20+% at the bottom, or when bonds lose over 10%...all happened in 2022.

Why are you not buying broker CD/Treasury? Fidelity treasuries pays 4.8% for 6 months (https://fixedincome.fidelity.com/ftgw/fi/FILanding) and you don't pay state tax.
Can I trade back and forth with CD/Treasury? it's inconvenienced.
Can I buy several hundreds thousands of I-bonds? I can't.
This is why I use MM and trade anytime I want.
Do I want to own ST vehicles after bonds had one of the worse years in decades in 2022? Absolutely not. I said already in Nov 2022 that bond funds have a good chance to make 10+% and many of them, several % more.
I basically see bond funds as more of a sure thing in 2023 than stocks + much lower volatility.

@Staycalm
Useful philosophical musings, but I have rarely seen concern for fairness in any policy making. There are many examples on both the right and the left. Lefties point to the tax structure etc but my favorite still has is the outrageous health insurance benefits (in CT work for the state for ten years, then quit and you still get lifetime health insurance!), retirement funds ( top 3 year average including overtime determines defined benefit) and high salaries a lot of state Government union workers continue to get, just for signing up ( and keeping) a job.
More to your point and what would happen in a default: I expect the reaction worldwide to an actual default would be so extreme that there would be little thought given to prioritizing in the days ahead who got paid with what was left.
After the Dow etc. drops 10000 to 15000 points overnight, ( and Gold goes to $5000 ) the debt ceiling will quickly be passed. Any legislator who votes against it will likely be run out of town.
@fred495
To take maximum advantage of the possibility, I would buy Treasuries and Gold, but be prepared to trade into stocks quickly. Other commodities necessary for survival will probably also skyrocket, although since most are priced in Dollars, hard to tell.
I don't think accumulating a month's worth of expenses in dollar bills is a bad idea either, or stocking up on canned goods and booze. I will certainly fill up my gas tank. ATMs and credit cards will probably not work very well.

I seems to me, although I haven’t looked at the 50 year chart that the major advantage this portfolio has is avoiding the two “lost decades”
“The key thing about AANA is that in 50 years it has never had a lost decade. Whether the 1970s or the 2000s, while Wall Street floundered, AANA has earned respectable returns.”
There have been two periods of almost ten years before the SP 500 returned to it’s previous high and stayed there. Not hard to beat that if you had any return at all, especially with roaring inflation in the 70s
I have seen several other “ simple portfolios” proposed. But if we used them, MFO would collapse!

Feeling “Whiplash” anyone?
James Stack notes in his January 9 update to subscribers that day to day volatility (S&P) over past 12 months is the 3rd highest in the last 60 years. It is exceeded only by 2008 and 2002.
Wow. I thought it was just me getting “jumpy”. :)
Can anyone explain why with all this volatility the VIX remains at relatively low readings?

Pretty similar portfolio & outlook to what @sma3 described; six years into retirement here with enough to last as long as I don't sustain significant losses. I'm slowly increasing three bond oef positions, expecting at best to get the yields as total returns ... and that would be just fine.
A next level of optimism would prob'ly lead to positions in allocation funds like CTFAX and/or WBALX, a conservative equity fund like PVCMX, and possibly an alt fund (long-short equity?) at least somewhat in synch with whatever the situation turns into.
About middle of the year, roughly half my T bills will have matured and I'll need to have a new allocation plan in place. Not particularly optimistic that there will be safe yields then as high as they are now, and I bought a slug of them in November and December, so won't likely be adding significantly more now.
Good luck out there. AJ

SCHP and TIP are twins for performance going back to January, 2013, including more recent time frames; 2 years,1 year, 6 months, 3 months and YTD. For LTPZ, one needs to monitor daily and it is best if one is a recent past or current champion in the bull riding section of World Rodeo. @Crash, have you looked at any of the BOND thread performance for various bond sectors?

@OJ and others who might have the same criticism this is why I asked about the specific composition of the initial portfolio. What was the makeup of alternative portfolios he's comparing AANA to? How does it compare to handing it all over to Warren Buffett and going hiking? If someone is going to say that AANA was a great way to go I'd want to see what they started with and changed over 50 years so that I could dig up my own back tested alternates also if I was OCD enough.

While I agree with the idea of diversification and disagree with posting articles’ texts in their entirety here, my main comment revolves around the hindsight is 20/20 and past performance is no guarantee of future results caveat. If anyone here could travel back to 1973, is this the asset allocation your younger self would have believed would work back then? OK, now how do you imagine the U.S. and the world will look like in 2073? Do you think history just repeats itself?
The advantage of this strategy though is it has different asset classes that work at different times in an economic cycle, inflationary and deflationary ones. But there’s no reason to believe that equal weighting these asset classes will produce optimal or even good results again in the next fifty years. It feels like too much reverse engineering/data mining with a flurry of new equal-weighted asset class ETFs in mind. These I expect will soon be launched with this backward looking data as their primary marketing tool. The ticker symbol could likely be AANA.
Figuring what has worked in the past and what will work in the future are two separate things. It is fair to ask if conditions today are similar to past ones and allocate accordingly, but I think nuance is necessary, asking what’s different today from the past and what remains the same.

Well it may not be an ad but it is crazy. IMHO if you're going to submit an article claiming that this group of ETF's has beaten Wall Street for 50 years it just seems to me that you would select funds/stocks & bonds/ whatever that have been in existence for those 50 years. So do we have a make believe history here or what? Saying that his chosen 7 are close enough or can be substituted doesn't quite cut it for me.
"Last year, 2022, marked the 50th year of this unheralded portfolio, which is termed “All Asset No Authority,” and which we’ve written about here before."
Q: what were the exact components of this portfolio on day one? I'll wait.

good grief, reading comp
It is NOT an ad.
Brett Arends has been a v smart financial writer for decades
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brett_Arends
The article:
Brett Arends's ROI
This ‘crazy’ retirement portfolio has just beaten Wall Street for 50 years
by Brett Arends
This strategy beats the market with less risk, fewer upsets and no ‘lost’ decades
You could call it crazy.
You could call it genius.
Or maybe you could call it a little of both.
We’re talking about a simple portfolio that absolutely anyone could follow in their own 401(k) or IRA or retirement account. Low cost, no muss, no fuss. And it’s managed to do two powerful things simultaneously.
It’s beaten the standard Wall Street portfolio of 60% U.S. stocks and 40% bonds. Not just last year, when it beat them by an astonishing 7 percentage points, but for half a century.
And it’s done so with way less risk. Fewer upsets. Fewer disasters. And no “lost” decades.
Last year, 2022, marked the 50th year of this unheralded portfolio, which is termed “All Asset No Authority,” and which we’ve written about here before.
It’s the brainchild of Doug Ramsey. He’s the chief investment officer of Leuthold & Co., a long-established fund management company that has sensibly located itself in Minneapolis, a long, long way away from Wall Street.
AANA is amazingly simple, surprisingly complex, and has been astonishingly durable. It consists simply of splitting your investment portfolio into 7 equal amounts, and investing one apiece in U.S. large-company stocks (the S&P 500 SPX, +2.28% ), U.S. small-company stocks (the Russell 2000 RUT, +2.26% ), developed international stocks (the Europe, Australasia and Far East or EAFE index), gold GC00, +0.04%, commodities, U.S. real-estate investment trusts or REITS, and 10 year Treasury bonds TMUBMUSD10Y, 3.562%.
It was Ramsey’s answer to the question: How would you allocate your long-term investments if you wanted to give your money manager no discretion at all, but wanted to maximize diversification?
AANA covers an array of asset classes, including real estate, commodities and gold, so it’s durable in periods of inflation as well as disinflation or deflation. And it’s a fixed allocation. You spread the money equally across the 7 assets, rebalancing once a year to put them back to equal weights. And that’s it. The manager — you, me, or Fredo — doesn’t have to do anything else. They not allowed to do anything else. They have no authority.
AANA did way better than the more usual Wall Street investments during 2022’s veil of tears. While it ended the year down 9.6%, that was far better than the S&P 500 (which plunged 18%), or a balanced portfolio of 60% U.S. stocks and 40% U.S. bonds, which fell 17%.
Crypto? Er, let’s not talk about that.
Last year’s success of AANA is due to two things, and them alone: Its exposure to commodities, which were up by about a fifth, and gold, which was level in dollars (and up 6% in euros, 12% in British pounds, and 14% when measured in Japanese yen).
Ramsey’s AANA portfolio has underperformed the usual U.S. stocks and bonds over the past decade, but that’s mainly because the latter have gone through a massive — and, it seems, unsustainable — boom. The key thing about AANA is that in 50 years it has never had a lost decade. Whether the 1970s or the 2000s, while Wall Street floundered, AANA has earned respectable returns.
Since the start of 1973, according to Ramsey’s calculations, it has earned an average annual return of 9.8% a year. That’s about half a percentage point a year less than the S&P 500, but of course AANA isn’t a high risk portfolio entirely tied to the stock market. The better comparison is against the standard “balanced” benchmark portfolio of 60% U.S. stocks and 40% Treasury bonds.
Since the start of 1973, according to data from New York University’s Stern business school, that 60/40 portfolio has earned an average compound return of 9.1% a year. That’s less than AANA. Oh, and this supposedly “balanced” portfolio fared very badly in the 1970s, and badly again last year.
You can (if you want) build AANA for yourself using just 7 low-cost ETFs: For example, the SPDR S&P 500 SPY, +2.29%, iShares Russell 2000 IWM, +2.25%, Vanguard FTSE Developed Markets VEA, +2.76%, abrdn Physical Gold Shares SGOL, +1.94%, a commodity fund such as the iShares S&P GSCI Commodity-Indexed Trust ETF GSG, +0.55%, the iShares 7-10 Year Treasury Bond ETF IEF, +1.29%, and the Vanguard Real Estate ETF VNQ, +2.69%.
The list is illustrative only. There are competing ETFs in each category, and in some — such as with commodities and REITs — they vary quite a lot. GSG happens to follow the particular commodity index that Ramsey uses in his calculations.
There are many worse investment portfolios out there, and it’s a question how many are better. AANA will underperform regular stocks and bonds in a booming bull market, but do better in a lost decade.
For those interested, Ramsey also offers a twist. His calculations also show that over the past 50 years the smart move to make at the start of each year was to invest in the asset class in the portfolio that performed second best in the previous 12 months. He calls that the “bridesmaid” investment. Since 1973 the bridesmaid has earned you on average 13.1% a year — a staggering record that trounces the S&P 500. Last year’s bridesmaid, incidentally, was terrible (it was REITs, which tanked). But most years it wins, and wins big.
If someone wants to take advantage of this simple twist, you could split the portfolio into 8 units, not 7, and use the eighth to double your investment in the bridesmaid asset. For 2023 that would be gold, which trailed commodities last year but broke even.
Crazy? Genius? For anyone creating a longterm portfolio for their retirement there are certainly many worse ideas — including many embraced by highly paid professionals, and marketed to the rest of us.

This small ($69M) sized Event Driven fund has had a really nice run. It's been around for almost 20 years. Would have to eat a 2% Front-end Load for the A class (EVDAX), which keeps many investors away.
I do see that ETRADE has it LOAD WAIVED. The Institutional version is $1M Min. Any takers?
As of 12-31-2022:
Camelot Event Driven Fund Class A
1 Yr 3 Yrs 5 Yrs 10 Yrs Life
3.51% 14.76% 12.05% 8.59% 7.26%

” The average stock market return is about 10% annually in the U.S. over time — but realistically, that figure varies widely from year to year, and it’s more like 6% to 7% when accounting for inflation. For context, it’s rare that the average stock market return is actually 10% in a given year. When looking at nearly 100 years of data, as of September 8, 2022, the yearly average stock market return was between 8% and 12% only eight times. In reality, stock market returns are typically much higher or much lower.” Source
Since gold has been mentioned, personally I’ve held small exposures to it through “thick and thin”. But more “thin” than thick. Nonetheless I remain optimistic. Folks are usually referring to p/m mining funds when they reference gold - albeit it is possible to buy ETFs that invest in the less volatile metal itself. Be aware gold funds have in the past declined by as much as 70% over shorter periods (3-4 years). How many small investors possess the fortitude to hold an asset like that when it’s in a downtrend?
Not promoting or discouraging gold. Just pointing out why you don’t hear a lot about it here. Hasn’t shined for at least a decade - few really good years over my 50+ years investing. Recently it has been hot. Friday alone my fund (OPGSX) and one mining stock I own were both up well over 3% on the day.

+1 hank No etfs were available 50 years ago, as SPY was launched in January 1993 !

“ Did no one rtfs?”
I did a quick read of the advertisement / article. Was only allowed to access it once on M/W and was cut off from subsequent reading.
This did not seem to be written in any kind of objective manner. Those who read the WSJ, Barrons, fund reports and prospectuses are not accustomed to simplistic analysis (using words like “crazy, amazing, simple”). However, if you think the world of equities, bonds, commodities, previous metals, real estate, derivatives can be boiled down to a “simplistic” formula that even a 12-year old could grasp - than by all means study the author’s scheme and take away his suggestions.
Reading Level / Text Analyzer
If the intent of the writer is to emphasize the importance of diversification across asset classes and regular rebalancing, I agree. In the past I recall more discussion on this board and its predecessor about both of those issues. Threads like “How much do you allocate to commodities?” or “How frequently do you rebalance?” were quite common. Today, less is said of that for whatever reason.
Does the plan involve owning ETFs? How many were available to retail investors 50 years ago - the date from which the success of this plan is purportedly measured?
50 years is a long time if the author’s assessment is accurate. While past performance does not necessarily predict future performance, I’d think it entirely possible to generate a 9% annual return over very long time periods with a well diversified portfolio and annual rebalancing.
As I said, I no longer have the article / Ad to view, so am going here with what I rirst glimpsed.