A gone-fishing portfolio has a limited number of investments with a balanced asset allocation that should do well with dampened volatility. Its primary appeal is simplicity, but a secondary virtue is that it avoids the worst mistakes of the financial services industry.

For those who would like assistance with investing, rebalancing, and managing their portfolio, our Do-It-Yourself service level may be a better fit.

For people with more invested assets or are in or near retirement, we recommend professional management and financial planning. For that reason, our calculators do not make recommendations beyond age 70.

Below is our standard gone-fishing portfolio which can be used at any custodian. It is the best for custodians who have no transactions fees for all Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs). Charles Schwab, Fidelity, and eTrade all have no ETF transaction fees and can use our default portfolio.

If you are just getting started with investing and have not yet selected a custodian, we recommend opening accounts with Charles Schwab. Charles Schwab and many other custodians have no transaction fees for U.S. security trades and have no minimum account requirements. For these and many other reasons, we recommend selecting Charles Schwab as your custodian and using the Default Gone-Fishing Portfolio.

You can read about the changes from last year in our article “An Overview of Marotta’s 2024 Gone-Fishing Portfolios.”

Regarding XCEM and VWO: For investors who don’t mind complexity, you could use a 50-50 allocation between these two funds. For investors who would prefer simplicity, you can select one or the other depending on your feelings about the threat of China. You can read more about this topic in “Executive Summary of the Possible Taiwan Conflict (June 2023)” and in our “An Overview of Marotta’s 2024 Gone-Fishing Portfolios” article. As of now by default if we had to pick, our recommendation is XCEM.

Photo by Basak Ar on Unsplash. Image has been cropped.