From Andy Rachleff, Vice Chairman, University of Pennsylvania endowment investment committee President & CEO, Wealthfront Inc.:
Financially sophisticated individuals start with an asset allocation. For someone under 40 you should probably allocate around 30% of your assets to fixed income securities (probably half in treasuries and half in TIPS) and the remainder in securities that have more appreciation opportunity (10% in real estate, 35% in US equities, 20% in foreign equities and 5% in emerging market stocks). it's very hard to outperform the market in fixed income so i recommend buying treasury and TIPS ETFs. For your US, foreign and emerging market equity allocation you might want to try wealthfront.com to identify money managers who have outstanding track records (I am a co-founder of wealthfront). Wealthfront currently doesn't offer any real estate managers so a REIT ETF is probably the best bet.
Both models are valid, and both models require different approaches. Steve Blank will be talking about this soon at Wealthfront and you should feel free to join.
As for the self-serving recruiting post... we're not recruiting anyone this year!
Great points, totally agree. Given the hype of HTML5 and canvas, we wanted to make sure to spread the word that it is not the tool that surpasses everything else.
Financially sophisticated individuals start with an asset allocation. For someone under 40 you should probably allocate around 30% of your assets to fixed income securities (probably half in treasuries and half in TIPS) and the remainder in securities that have more appreciation opportunity (10% in real estate, 35% in US equities, 20% in foreign equities and 5% in emerging market stocks). it's very hard to outperform the market in fixed income so i recommend buying treasury and TIPS ETFs. For your US, foreign and emerging market equity allocation you might want to try wealthfront.com to identify money managers who have outstanding track records (I am a co-founder of wealthfront). Wealthfront currently doesn't offer any real estate managers so a REIT ETF is probably the best bet.