magician

Thanks for the props. It's interesting that the financial advisor to whom I had given the portfolio originally was utterly uncomfortable with the allocation ("Do you realize that you have almost 60% in foreign equities?" "Yes, but if I lived in Europe they'd be domestic equities.") and required me to sign a statement accepting all the responsibility/risk for my portfolio. Sigh.

They're designed as stand-alone portfolios because I cannot move money between them. Furthermore, they have no securities in common, so the analyses are separate.

You'll note that the smaller account is the one in which I chose to be more aggressive.

Volatility/Risk is the standard deviation of monthly returns over the last five years. I could use lower semivariance as a risk measure, or semivariance below a target rate of, say, 2% (see cthree's discussion of inflation/GDP growth, above), if I wanted to limit downside risk specifically; however, the historical returns on these portfolios have been fairly close to symmetric, so the differences in optimal allocations using different risk measures is minimal.

Fifteen to twenty.

cthree

That's rich! What sort of portfolio would you need to have where the FA would accept all risk and responsibility?

I'm guessing the disclaimer is a standard disclosure that everyone has to sign whether they be in 100% treasury bonds or 100% Indonesian penny stocks.