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Global Asset Allocation: A Survey of the World’s Top Asset Allocation Strategies

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With all of our focus on assets - and how much and when to allocate them - are we missing the bigger picture?

Our book begins by reviewing the historical performance record of popular assets like stocks, bonds, and cash. We look at the impact inflation has on our money. We then start to examine how diversification through combining assets, in this case a simple stock and bond mix, works to mitigate the extreme drawdowns of risky asset classes.

But we go beyond a limited stock/bond portfolio to consider a more global allocation that also takes into account real assets. We track 13 assets and their returns since 1973, with particular attention to a number of well-known portfolios, like Ray Dalio’s All Weather portfolio, the Endowment portfolio, Warren Buffett’s suggestion, and others. And what we find is that, with a few notable exceptions, many of the allocations have similar exposures.

And yet, while we are all busy paying close attention to our portfolio’s particular allocation of assets, the greatest impact on our portfolios may be something we fail to notice altogether...

142 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 2, 2015

199 people are currently reading
589 people want to read

About the author

Mebane T. Faber

7 books74 followers

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5 stars
237 (29%)
4 stars
307 (38%)
3 stars
199 (24%)
2 stars
49 (6%)
1 star
10 (1%)
Displaying 1 - 30 of 53 reviews
Profile Image for Vitalijus Sostak.
138 reviews24 followers
March 29, 2015
Short and sweet advice aimed at individual investor

It's a short book that will take you only few hours to finish. Thanks for respecting my time!
The book takes long term view on "optimal" strategic asset allocation (common history starts in 1973, which is probably fair to draw reasonable conclusions). Several simple&dirty approaches are analyzed along with essential risk/return stats for easy comparison. Author lays out how exactly global diversified portfolio should look like and provides some practical implementation tips as well.

Bottom line: INVALUABLE guide to investing for any individual investor!
Won't get old/irrelevant for many years, if not a decade or more.

PS Being a professional investor, the part that I personally liked the most in this book were links and references. Great selection of references on always-relevant topics!
Profile Image for Arthur Kosten.
25 reviews
March 31, 2020
Describes principles and about 10 famous portfolios and their returns and volatily over time. Short (1 hour reading), down to earth and highly practical.
345 reviews3,088 followers
August 20, 2018
Meb Faber has written a short and accessible study over some of the more prevailing strategic asset allocation (SAA) strategies used by institutional investors. SAA is the method for setting long-term target allocations for various assets that is included in an investment portfolio. Mr. Faber is a co- founder and CIO of Cambria Investment Management and a prolific blog writer and book author. The main conclusion of the book that the author wants to drive through is that different asset allocation strategies give similar returns and what will make real life results differ is the level of fees deducted from the returns.

Global Asset Allocation covers 3 sections over a total of 130 pages. The first is looking back on the international history of core asset classes such as equities, bonds, bills and cash during the last 100 years or so. The conclusion is that they all contain risk and react differently at special points in time. Hence, diversification is the way to go. Then follows the second section that presents a number of asset allocation strategies. A total of 13 SAA strategies are covered either in the body text or in the appendixes and these include risk parity portfolios as populated by Bridgewater, the endowment type of portfolio made famous by Yale’s David Swensen and Marc Faber’s portfolio with a focus on real assets. The 60/40-portfolio is as usual used as the reference portfolio. Each chapter begins with a short text introduction covering the basics and background of the strategy, a table over the used asset allocation, graphs over back-tested returns going back to the early 1970s and tables providing the portfolio’s return, volatility, Sharpe-ratio and max drawdown.

Finally there are a number of chapters that compare the many SAA strategies, discuss the implementation of them, draw conclusions and try to answer frequent questions. The bottom line is that the returns of the strategies are relatively similar so it’s more important to pick one, rebalance and keep to it than to try to optimize the choice. With relatively minor differences between strategies, the fees it costs to implement then become the deciding variable when it comes to determining which one will bring the most wealth over time.

Faber focuses on three main asset classes: stocks, bonds and real assets such as commodities including gold, TIPS and real estate. He leaves out hedge funds, presumably as they are strategies rather than asset classes, and also private equity which is an illiquid form of stocks. All SAA strategies receive their allocation over those three categories. The problem is that the endowment portfolio’s defining focus is private equity and to some extent hedge funds. Further, what stands out with Rob Arnott’s SAA strategy is the dynamic value bias within equities and the leverage used by Bridgewater is an integral part of their strategy and these features are also weeded out. The motive is obviously to be able to compare apples to apples. However, it’s a bit odd to remove much of what separates SAA strategies from each other and then draw the conclusion that they all give pretty much the same returns since they have similar exposures.

With the many tables and graphs the text isn’t especially taxing but the reader probably should have some advance knowledge of portfolio management. With limited amount of effort the reader gets a good overview of almost all strategic asset allocation strategies in use. It’s perhaps more of a survey then a book. If the author had taken the time to deepen the discussion on each strategy it would have increased the value of Global Asset Allocation. To make up for the limited discussion Faber includes a number of useful Internet links. If I correctly read between the lines, it seams that the author due to the limited expected future returns of equities and bonds today favors strategies that own more of real assets. Apart from the fact that these assets are all the rage today, it is sometimes hard to be certain that these assets aren’t equally expensive.

In all, a user-friendly, handy but thin overview.
Profile Image for Sagar Chamoli.
214 reviews15 followers
November 3, 2022
2.5 stars



Key Takeway

- Any asset by itself can experience catastrophic losses.
- Diversifying your portfolio by including uncorrelated assets is truly the only free lunch.
- 60/40 has been a decent benchmark, but due to current valuations, it is unlikely to deliver strong returns going forward.
- At a minimum, an investor should consider moving to a global 60/40 portfolio to reflect the global market capitalization, especially right now due to lower valuations in foreign markets.
Consider including real assets such as commodities, real estate, and TIPS in your portfolio.
- While covered more extensively in our other three books and white papers, consider tilting the equity exposure to factors such as value and momentum. Trend following approaches work great too.
- Once you have determined your asset allocation mix, or policy portfolio, stick with it.
- The exact percentage allocations don’t matter than much.
- Make sure to implement the portfolio with a focus on fees and taxes.
- Consider using an asset allocation ETF, advisor, or other automated investment service in order to make it easier to stick to the portfolio and rebalancing schedule. Yearly (or even every few years) rebalancing is just fine. Even better, rebalance based on tax considerations.
- Go live your life and don’t worry about your portfolio!

Conclusion
Its a very short and basic book which focus upon few allocation strategies. Overall, I did not find it that helpful.
Profile Image for Rubén.
50 reviews
June 19, 2023
El libro merece bastante la pena, seria un 4 si no tuviera fallos técnicos como estar mal la tabla de la cartera permanente.

Interesante para conocer, en sus puntos mas basicos, las distintas estrategias de asignación de activos.

Me ha sacado la idea de que tenia que hacer una cartera permanente que ya me empezaba a chirriar porque no es para mi perfil (aunque sigue siendo a mi ojo la opción preferida para alguien con mucha aversión al riesgo o más mayor) .

Simple y al grano, recomendado pero la edición necesita una mejora.
69 reviews
March 30, 2021
Excellent book on asset allocation, which - even if succint - argues its points with lots of data.

Main points:
- owning just an asset class, even if done long term, may not be that good of a deal - for e.g. during 1929-1949 stocks underperformed bonds, and bonds historically have had drawdowns up to 60% in the UK/US and even 80% in other countries
- you must also include real assets (TIPS, commodities, gold, REITs) in your portofolio
- choose a portofolio you are comfortable with, the exact percentage allocations is not that important; more important are the taxes and commissions
- commissions can make the best portofolio in the book perform worse than the worse portofolio
- tilt the equity exposure to factors such as value and momentum, which have better performance than market capitalization
- rebalancing must be done, but the frequency doesn't matter that much; it can be done once a year if it helps you optimize your taxes.

One last thing which is not pointed out in the book but which I find interesting, is that corporate bonds have a really good Sharpe ratio of 0.55 over the 1973-2013 period. This asset class also has a big 35% allocation in the Risk Parity portofolio proposed by Faber in chapter 4.
158 reviews13 followers
October 5, 2024
Pretty low effort book. Probably a hundred thousand people could have banged this out in a week with a word processor and a Bloomberg terminal. But this guy did and I’m not aware of this info anywhere else. Probably the most startling result is that the long term outcome of every portfolio is within 100bp of every other portfolio. Of course the drawdowns differ dramatically, a finding that I was aware of but have still not fully internalized.

What all of these books on asset allocation for individuals lack is an appreciation for the situation individuals actually find themselves in. Which is that they are not pension funds with holding periods approximating forever, but corporeal beings with annual expenses and retirement plans. And the book knows who it’s audience is but fails to apprehend their condition.

So the information is interesting. Certainly worth a skim. But content more like a lengthy blog post on a topic of interest than a book-length treatment.
Author 3 books1 follower
January 20, 2023
You'd be forgiven from reading the title to this book for thinking that it will have all the appeal of physics text book

In fact though if you're looking to invest for the long term this is a concise and very easy to digest summary of a huge amount of investing material. What Meb does well is compare the different strategies from various famous investors over the long term and look at the results. Some of the results are shocking (based on typical costs - choosing the worst performing collection of funds yourself would have been better than getting any fund manager to choose the best collection)

Only one recommendation - because there are lots of comparisons there are also lots of charts in this book. Don't do what I did and download it on a (black and white) kindle - you do need colour to understand the points being made.
596 reviews2 followers
March 24, 2021
Short, but good information. Largely similar analysis to some of the same data in Tony Robbins' Money book, but the author does point out a couple of nuances and examines the difference in a balanced portfolio. I'm still not sold on balance for younger investors, but this makes the strongest argument that I have read. Worth considering and well worth the read.
1 review
December 14, 2017
Quick read, valuable insight!

Great book to get a better sense of the different asset allocation strategies. Tip to Kindle readers; there are a few more really useful pages after Kindle tells you that you finished the book... Continue reading
169 reviews6 followers
November 25, 2018
Hard to believe this is called a book. Not sure if the content suffices a paper for publication.
Profile Image for Pablo María Fernández.
488 reviews21 followers
September 18, 2023
I found this book thanks to Santiago Magnin’s recommendation on his YouTube’s channel. Written in 2015 is quite short but brings interesting insights on investing. Having read many books on the topic (without being a professional or even a specialist), I still found new information on stocks, bonds, gold and other assets as investment options. The author compares the return for each of them on different time periods, regions and countries providing a longer and bigger view that is usually absent in most analysys. He also introduces well-known investors' portfolios like Ray Dalio’s “All Weather” showing their real performance.

In summary, it is a good starting point for the ones interested in this topic and it could also be useful to refresh your knowledge with a quick read on the main concepts and insights.

Some of my favorite quotes:

"The so-called 'gorilla' are the fees that we often fail to consider."

"While stocks typically suffer from sharper price declines, bonds often have their value eroded by inflation."

"One of the problems with investing in just one security, country, or asset class. Normal market returns are extreme."

"Only free lunch in investing -diversification."

"Sharpe ratio is a measure of risk adjusted returns, and is calculated as: (returns - risk free rate)/volatility (...) a higher sharpe ratio is better."

"It is emotionally challenging, largely, since we anchor to the highest value a portfolio has attained."

"Basically how anything can happen over short periods of time."

"The single biggest take away from this book is to not ruin your allocation by paying too much in fees."

"Make sure to implement the portfolio with a focus on fees and taxes."
Profile Image for Kyle.
44 reviews40 followers
November 4, 2025
It falls so far short of what I expect from a "book" that I can't recommend it as such, even if I agree with its conclusions.

It's essentially an executive summary of a few key (Power)points that shouldn't surprise anyone who ought to be taking responsibility for investment decisions. Of course, most people lack the expertise to make informed investment decisions and are subject to exploitation, which is why the abolition of defined benefit pensions and their substitution with extortionate non-fiduciary investment products privileged by inclusion in regressive tax shelters is a slow motion social disaster, but I digress.

The main point is that most diversified asset allocations perform extremely similarly over time. In practice, the difference in performance is completely overwhelmed by differences in management fees. Also, institutions still carry significant home-country asset-allocation bias, which reduces the benefits of diversification considerably.

So the take-away is: don't pay high fees, and use a globally weighted allocation.

Most of the book is just tables and graphs from back tests of famous asset allocation strategies. You can find this sort of thing on hundreds of different finance websites.

The only reason I can think of to read this book is if the above arguments are totally new to you, or you want to evaluate Faber's thought process before making use of one of his investment products.
789 reviews
September 17, 2017
Finished July 29, 2017. Readability 8. Rating 6. A strong 6 when I expected nothing. Data driven looks at asset allocation without fluff and with an eye on reality (e.g., keeping the fact that bonds have been in a 35-year bull market). Great reminder to me that I need to think about asset allocation differently since we aren't striving to maximize returns. Almost a reference work in that regard. However, the data set doesn't provide insights into asset allocation in a low-rate world, which is a pretty huge shortcoming.
Profile Image for hamad.
17 reviews2 followers
December 27, 2024
already out of date

“U.S. stocks have returned a meager 4.9% per year from 2000 – 2014 and, factoring in inflation, have returned 1.90% per year, provided investors had the ability to sit through two gut-wrenching bear markets with declines of over 45%. According to recent DALBAR studies, many have not. 1.9% per year is a far cry from the historical 6.47% that U.S. stocks have returned over the full period from 1900-2014.”
Profile Image for Shaun N.
11 reviews
July 9, 2017
A quick and dirty read!

Probably the quickest read with great links to other articles. Especially good if you're looking to learn a little more about asset allocation. If you're in the ,armed for some time, this may just serve to reflect how much asset allocations can impact your portfolio.
Profile Image for Tony.
252 reviews18 followers
March 5, 2019
Interesting overview of diversified portfolios advocated by investing "greats" and how over the long-run they usually converge on performance. The key takeaway is which allocations can you achieve at what cost, because the largest impact on long-term performance will be the fees you pay to hold the allocation.
1 review
August 16, 2020
Meb is great

Enjoy listening to his podcast, checking out his tweets, and reading his white papers and books. This was very informative about how important globally diversifying is for equities, and how adding real assets can help hedge rising inflation. Great overview, and straight to the point.
Profile Image for ilya murychev.
134 reviews2 followers
January 30, 2021
Отличная книга про портфельное инвестирование. Язык очень простой и все по делу. Одна из самых хороших книг, которые я читал по инвестированию.

An excellent book on portfolio(index) investing. The language is very simple and everything is to the point. One of the nicest books I've read on investing.
2 reviews
September 2, 2018
Returns are not impacted by diversifying

The book comments on a number of popular portfolios and the take home message is that you can get good returns regardless of allocation, as long as you can stick with your portfolio through thick and thin.
Profile Image for Jeff Ryan.
6 reviews
June 1, 2019
Consolidated view of popular asset allocations over time.

A terrific comparison of the various asset allocation models over time. Consolidated and simplified view that leaves you with direction and a plan, not more confusion.
Profile Image for Mark Hillick.
246 reviews8 followers
November 8, 2020
Great introduction

Great introduction to asset allocation.

Practical, clearly communicated and evidence-based with plenty of statistics, which are concisely explained.

The book also contains a substantial amount of links for follow-up research and reading.
2 reviews
February 14, 2021
Excellent Summary of Global Allocation

The book was an excellent read. It opened my eyes to global allocation. It forced me to rethink my biases of foreign markets. Thanks for the allocation comparisons.
Profile Image for Lukas.
2 reviews1 follower
August 16, 2017
Good read for a basic introduction to asset allocation
4 reviews1 follower
November 18, 2019
Excellent comparison of various Asset Allocation Strategies and how they perform historically.
9 reviews1 follower
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December 23, 2019
Interesting overview of popular portfolio building strategies.
1 review
December 16, 2020
Very informative

I liked the systematic approach presented by Meb Faber. Would recommend this book. Will be sure to read more of his work.

Displaying 1 - 30 of 53 reviews

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