Is a 60/40 portfolio actually diversified?

60% in an S&P 500 fund, 40% in total-market bonds — the allocation everyone calls balanced, measured rather than argued about.

Where the risk sits

PORTFOLIO: 60/40
1990-01-02 to 2026-11-06 · 9,281 trading days · USD

2 holdings.
Together they swing like 1.3 separate bets.

VOO: 60% of the money, 97% of the risk.
Volatility 11% · worst fall on record 35%.
Risk 11% → 9% over the last year, mostly because the holdings themselves got quieter.

Descriptive. No forecast, no advice. Every figure above is measured over the window named at the top.
folionomiq.com

What this does not say

• How many equal, independent holdings would swing the way this portfolio does: two that move independently read 2, two that move as one read 1. It describes the past window; it is not a forecast of loss and does not predict a drawdown.
• A technical figure, not a count of separate bets (F2 is that) and not a measure of concentration: two funds that move independently can still show half or more here.
• Past window only. Says nothing about the next one.
• Noisier than it looks: on sixteen years of a 60/40 book the 90% interval around this figure is about a Sharpe of 0.5 to 1.4. Read it as a band, not a score.
• The worst fall *in this window*. A longer window would very likely contain a worse one.
• Loading signs are fixed so the largest is positive; a negative loading means that holding moves against the others.
• The ratio is the finding. A weight alone cannot say whether a position is large, because that depends on everything else held.
• Today's weights are held fixed across both stretches. This is what the MARKET did to the book you hold now — not a history of the book, which this app does not store. Reading it as 'my trades caused this' would be exactly backwards.
• The window ends at the youngest holding: one recently listed position shortens the history for all of them.

Your own portfolio

Same engine, same window rules, nothing saved on our side.

Other examples

Measured 1990-01-02 to 2026-11-06 over 9,281 trading days, in USD, from yahoo prices. Descriptive: this page reports what these holdings have done and how their risk is built. It does not forecast returns or losses and it is not advice. How every figure is measured, window by window, with the limit of each printed beside it. If a figure here looks wrong, say so: [email protected]. Terms and privacy: /terms.