When I read "share an asset you really believe in," to me that's a sign of a value investor. (Some high % of the time they are looking to shoot it down, too, kind of like a self protection exercise, but hey, sometimes an asset sucks)
For that reason I wanted to share a slightly different perspective. With quant or technical analysis on the other side of the value investing / fundamentals scale, it's more like "believe more in your learning, systems- and perception-building processes, and less in the asset".
Percent of allocations to various asset classes also seems to me like a contingency-plan-focused value investor's hedge against basically everything. It's building a thickly-walled castle on a nice piece of real estate instead of designing a class of moon rockets. Which is totally fine, but personally I wish I would have known about that earlier in my investing journey. To put this in perspective, I bought into my first mutual fund at 21, and only started trading actively at around age 41.
(Also I tried to call market top with my $600 bear-mindset mutual fund and panic sold. lol)
So, if you're more of a contingency-focused value investor, I guess I'd rather share possibly-relevant blind spot perspectives than asset allocations or stocks. These have radically transformed my experience and returns:
- IMO risk scaling and testing is healthy. I try to always leave some room for YOLO, even if it's .01% of your portfolio. In this group I keep sub-penny stocks and lottery tickets. And yes, I have them. Tiny downside, potentially big upside. Fun, too. I designed a simple system for vetting penny stocks and it's been enjoyable to watch them take off like fireworks once there's a catalyst. For everything else in this zone which doesn't take off, there's an entry point & stop loss strategy to help out.
- IMO an investing system itself should be designed and constantly refined from the outside in, ideally from outside-the-individual in. Exposure to other people, and actually trying new ideas often. Otherwise the risk of the system matching your subjective psychology will compound itself, and when this happens it's too easy to end up doubling down on subjective weaknesses. This happened to me with risk at the front end of my investing practice, so I had to learn to work around my concerns and design a risk-managed system.
- IMO there's a group of value investors who seem really into historic bad-hair-days and this becomes a sort of value investor porn, preparing for the next epic crash. But to me, preparations for the next epic crash could go even better if you jump into a terrific asset with a beautiful chart which is part of a nice sector which is rotating right into an epic bull market. Make a bunch of out-sized profits while the sun shines, and nope out of anything else (CAN SLIM is similar to this in a lot of ways).
- Final IMO: There's way too much commentary along the lines of "you can't beat the S&P" in the value investor community. I was in this boat myself until I discovered that the CAGR of the S&P 500 is something like 10%. lol. Then I got _really_ curious and discovered some new ways to think about this.
AAII was a good resource for this part of my journey, and the local meetups (even if online) have been absolutely worth the time.
All just In My Opinion...good luck to you.