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Anonymous

18 Apr 2019

General Investing

Is there such thing as overdiversification of portfolio?

Discussion (3)

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Yes, too much of everything is bad. The purpose of diversification is to lower the risk of losing signifcant portion of your portfolio during different economic periods. When over-diversify, you spread your investment too thinly into too many categories. Sure your risk will be lower, but your potential gains will be lower too.

An exaggerated example:

You think stocks are risky so you invests in T bills, T notes, Govt bonds, gold, silver, platinum, bitcoin, litecoin, ethereum, commercial REIT, hospitality REIT, residential REIT, option, futures...

Kelly Trinh

21 Nov 2019

Backoffice technical at financial services firm

Need to consider what you mean by over diversification - diversification of an investment portfolio aims to remove so-called nonsystemic volatility through holding many (hopefully uncorrelated) assets.

STI has 30 constituents (and is considered quite a narrow index), S&P500 has 500 (companies - holdings are slightly higher due to dual class shares) and some world stock ETFs have thousands of underlying holdings. A breadth of exposures is generally considered desirable for a long term investor.

However, if you are directly holding many different instruments (eg 30 different holdings, whether direct shares or managed funds or ETFs) then you start to lose track of entry time/price and less clear about overall strategy/asset allocation. That is obviously not desirable but that doesn't take away from underlying benefits of diversification.

Paridhi Jhunjhunwala

19 Nov 2019

Associate at Kristal.AI

Hi!

Yes, there is a chance that over-diversification takes place. Diversification refers to the process of investing in different asset classes to reduce the risk of the portfolio. This is because different asset classes (equity, debt etc.) show varying returns in the same situation. Thus, negatively correlated assets provide diversification benefits as the negative returns from one asset can be compensated by the positive returns in another category.
However, once the unsystematic or diversifiable risk has been eradicated, there is no benefit derived from adding more aseets into the portfolio. Now, the portfolio will be over-diversified.

I work at kristal.AI, and it's my passion to evaluate various upcoming investment opportunities.

Hope you find this helful.

Elijah Lee

18 Nov 2019

Senior Financial Services Manager at Phillip Securities (Jurong East)

Hi Boon Kiat,

Yes, there comes a point where over-diversification occurs.

Usually when one diver...

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