A perspective on Diversification

Diversification is an often used term in the investment world.

There are many different ideas that world renowned investors, such as Ray Dalio, have brought to the public.

His ideas on diversifying in uncorrelated stocks have been an eye opener to most and it’s this type of unique thinking which places Ray Dalio in the pantheon of investment gurus.

I want to take a look at diversification from a different perspective, according to time.

Some people think you need to diversify your stock purchases immediately or in the near term, for example if you were to spend £3000 on Stock this year they would say you need to spread that across 6/7 different investments.

I say you could spend that £3000 on only 1 or 2 investments.

If you were to repeat the same practice over the next 4/5 years, choosing different stocks each time, that could over time give you a well diversified portfolio.

The obvious benefits of buying stocks like this would be reduced fees, instead of paying your broker 6 or 7 trading fees for that £3000 invested, you would only be paying them for trading once or twice during the same period.

Reduced volatility could also be a benefit but I will save that for another post.

But over a lifetime of buying stock, especially if you are intending to hold for long periods as Warren Buffett suggests, this type of buying is not as crazy as it sounds.