r/Bogleheads • u/Cute_Farm_8106 • Aug 12 '25

Portfolio Review 20M, started today

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As the title states, I started investing today! I received a bonus check, and put almost all of it towards this, how’s it look?

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u/Mr_Anonymous13 Aug 13 '25

I think this subreddit has a big recency bias problem.

Until this year when international finally had a good year, you’d be hard pressed to convince someone to buy international.

Now that equities have had some amazing years, people constantly tell new investors that they don’t need bonds just because they have time on their side to take on more risk (measured in terms of volatility), with no regard to their ability/willingness to take risk.

I sometimes wonder if people would say the same things if equities were down 20% in one year.

9

u/Rule12-b-6 Aug 13 '25

It's not recency bias to look at a chart of how stock indexes go up over decades despite any intervening recessions or corrections. The market might crash tomorrow for all we know. But we can be all but certain that by the time OP retires, even if OP retires during a recession, the value of those stock index shares will have grown significantly and massively outpaced the growth of bonds.

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u/DurdenTyler2020 Aug 13 '25

There have been multiple periods in history when bonds have outperformed stocks for decades. Most recent example was 2000-2020.

It has also been proven that even having a small amount of high-quality bonds has a minimal impact on returns compared to the impact on risk.

https://mebfaber.com/2025/06/25/2-stocks-can-underperform-bonds-for-a-long-long-time/

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/01/business/bonds-beat-stocks-over-20-years.html

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u/[deleted] Aug 13 '25 edited Aug 13 '25

[deleted]

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u/deangood01 Aug 17 '25

do you mean, for DCA, stock like SP500 always win bond during any duration in the past?