Its a question posed by Investors Chronicle. Here’s the article.
We have argued for some time that bonds are riskier, which makes investment portfolios potentially not as suitable.
A recent study by asset manager Man Group also suggests that a 60/40 portfolio may not offer as much diversification as you think. The asset manager studied the performance of global equity and investment-grade bond markets over the last 80 years, and found that a 60/40 portfolio was 93 per cent correlated to equities, and only weakly correlated to bonds.
Of course, there are alternative views. The FT featured a fund manager from PIMCO, who stated “One answer for 60/40 portfolio investors is to divide fixed-income investments into two subcomponents — hedging and yield assets. By doing so, investors can create a well-diversified fixed-income portfolio that can still provide tremendous benefit to multi-asset portfolios.” But then again, its PIMCOs job to persuade you to follow their reasoning. Their job is selling funds after all.
Whatever your view, you simply need to review your existing portfolio to assess whether it is still suitable. Do the analysis yourself or employ someone independent of your existing asset managers and advisors as the conflicts of interest are too strong to ignore.