---
title: I Read a Wealthsimple Piece on Diversification and Went to Check My Own Portfolio
description: Wealthsimple's magazine has a good breakdown of what 'diversified' actually means. It sent me digging into my own Managed Investing account to see if mine holds up.
---

# I Read a Wealthsimple Piece on Diversification and Went to Check My Own Portfolio

Wealthsimple's magazine has a good breakdown of what 'diversified' actually means. It sent me digging into my own Managed Investing account to see if mine holds up.

I'd always used "diversified" the way most people probably do — as a synonym for "I own more than one stock." A piece on Wealthsimple's magazine called *How Do I Diversify, Anyway?* made it clear I was using the word pretty loosely, so I went and actually looked at what's inside my own portfolio.

## What the article actually argues

The piece opens with Ray Dalio calling diversification "the Holy Grail of investing" — his point being that holding assets that don't all move together is one of the few ways to raise your returns without raising your risk. (It also notes Charlie Munger thinks that's overrated, which I appreciated — not everyone agrees, and the article doesn't pretend they do.)

The part that actually changed how I think about it was the geography example: over the past 50 years, U.S., Japanese, and Canadian stocks each took turns dominating different decades, and no one knew in advance which one it would be. A portfolio spread across all of them held up better than betting on whichever market happened to be hot.

It also lays out a few real allocation models instead of just saying "diversify" and leaving it there — the Yale endowment's Swensen model (roughly 30% domestic stocks, 15% foreign stocks, 20% REITs, 30% bonds/TIPS, 5% emerging markets), the simpler three-fund portfolio (roughly a third each in domestic stocks, international stocks, and bonds), and the classic 60/40 stocks-to-bonds split. None of them is presented as the "correct" answer — the article's actual conclusion is that the right mix depends on your own time horizon and risk tolerance.

## So I checked what I actually hold

I use Wealthsimple's Managed Investing for my RRSP, on the Classic portfolio, and until reading this I'd genuinely never opened the holdings breakdown to see what's in it beyond "a bunch of ETFs." Turns out it's already doing roughly what the article describes — a mix of Canadian, U.S., and international equity ETFs plus a bond ETF, weighted by my stated risk level, rebalanced automatically whenever the actual mix drifts from the target. It's not identical to any of the three named models, but it's the same underlying idea: don't let one country or one asset class decide the whole outcome.

What I got out of this wasn't a reason to change anything — it was actually reassuring to confirm the "set it and forget it" part of managed investing isn't just marketing copy, there's a real allocation behind it. If you're using Trade instead and picking your own ETFs, this is worth 10 minutes of checking your own account for the same reason: it's easy to assume you're diversified because you own five things, when really you own five things that all move together.

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*This post shares my personal take and isn't financial advice — see my [full disclosure](https://wealthsimplereferral.ca/en/disclosure/) for details.*

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Source: [Wealthsimple](https://www.wealthsimple.com/en-ca/magazine/how-do-i-diversify)

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