What do people think of the permarment portfolio (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fail-Safe_Investing). The proposal is to diversify your investments equally across stocks, bonds, gold and cash equivalents. The idea is that for any particular market condition (inflation, deflation, stagnation and growth), 3 of the asset classes won't do too well, while the fourth will do spectacularly well and average out the losses in the other 3. The other benefit (unlike simple stock/bond investing) is that the portfolio seems to be pretty immune to variance from start date (ie, while investing in the S&P has consistently yielded around 7-8% real returns, their is pretty high variance in this number depending on when you start the calculation). For example, here are some backtesting results showing that the portfolio averages 9.7% - http://crawlingroad.com/blog/2008/12/22/permanent-portfolio-..., which is pretty competitive with 100% stock allocation.