What are your guidelines to maintaining your warchest?

I try and keep about 10-20% of my portfolio in cash, depending on how much bargains there are available in the market :-)

My humble opinion:

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As you mentioned, 6-12 mths is the common figure most people work with for allocation of emergency funds.

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As for warchest, the number can vary from investor to investor. I'd say a baseline of 10% in the form of cash or highly liquid cash equivalent would be a good number to work with.

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Alternatively, if you expect a correction looming in the horizon, you may bump the numbers up to 15%-20% so you have more dry powder to deploy if the crash do come by.

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That being said, nobody has a crystal ball and it's actually extremely hard to predict the next big market movement.

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Not financial advice, just my thoughts.

Cheers! :)

I keep Emergency fund as cash War chest and CPF as Additional chest do as not too "La Fei" wasted.

Warchest makes no sense:

https://www.google.ch/amp/s/www.fool.com/amp/in...

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for myself I invest any surplus immediately (often so that my emergency funds are too low).

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When markets on the long run are expected to go up, holding a significant non-emergency warchest only to wait for small or big market crashes - from a statistical view - probably would lead to missing out relevant capital gains.