I use LifeStrategy 60% as a benchmark for my 50%:50% portfolio and a challenge I regularly pose is "why wouldn't you put all your pot in LS60?".

To delve into this I've pulled together some historical performance statistics using every month end price on the accumulation units from when the fund first started in June 2011. Source: Vanguard website (excellent data export by the way in "Professional Investors" tab)



So for example, in my 3 year figures above there are 120 3-year periods using month ends since June 2011. There has never been a negative 3 year spell on that basis and in fact the worst you would have got is 1.0% per annum. The best you would have got is 11.4% per annum.

I'm going to let this sit and swirl for a while but immediate reactions are:

1. This looks like a solid set of numbers (noting the equity bull run of course)
2. 7% per annum is decently more than I need not to run out of money

Anyway, sharing here, hope it is of interest to some

Thanks Rob, yes if you have the discipline not to tinker and stay the course then there are worse calls than 100% in LS60 and leave it to do the business.

However, I don't underestimate how hard that can be and I think that's why xxd09 gets a lot of respect on the forum.

By way of further information, I ran the following chart which double checks the long term average figure of 7.1% per annum that I got from my number crunching in the previous post ......

What does the 20 year chart look like? 2011 is in the early days of QE. Bonds as a consequence benefited for the next decade.

Bit difficult as VLS60 wasn't launched until June 2011

We can look for a proxy with a longer record though... VLS60 sits in the "IA Mixed Investment 40-85% Shares" sector, and charting (total return) that too over the history of the UK VLS60 gives this (the IA line is the cap-weighted average of all the funds in that sector):

(Also added CPI + 3% & CPI + 4% lines just to give a sense of real terms returns).

So VLS60 looks like it behaves a lot like "IA Mixed Investment 40-85% Shares" but has outperformed that "index" by ~0.2%-0.3%pa in recent history, and 1.1%pa over a decade... I'd guess because of things like it being cheaper than the industry average (pumped up by active management OCFs) and having less home bias than most funds in that IA sector (the impact becoming less more recently as the rest of the industry has caught up with Vanguard on fees and asset allocation). But it's just a guess.

Over the longer term, we can't chart VLS60 but trustnet can chart "IA Mixed Investment 40-85% Shares" back to 1990 (NB different colours to above chart):

If it had been possible to buy VLS60 back in 1990 and its behaviour compared to "IA Mixed Investment 40-85% Shares" had been much the same as it was in the last decade, then it seems not unreasonable to conclude that VLS60 would have ended up somewhere near the red CPI+4% line.