Cullen Roche on the Art of Building a Perfect Portfolio
Odd Lots
Bloomberg
4.5 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 12 January 2026
⏱️ 55 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
For a long time, you could make plenty of money and sleep easy at night with a simple 60/40 portfolio. You put 60% of your money in stocks and 40% in Treasuries. The stocks generally went up. The Treasuries cushioned you during times of volatility and provided income. Then we got the worst inflation in 40 years, and the Treasury part of those portfolios got obliterated. So does it still work? And if not, how should an investor think about their own personal allocations to various asset classes. On this episode, we speak with Cullen Roche, the founder and CIO of Discipline Funds and the author of the new book, Your Perfect Portfolio: The ultimate guide to using the world's most powerful investing strategies. His book goes through a number of different ideas in portfolio construction, talking about their pluses and minuses, as well as their history. In this conversation, he explains his general philosophy and how one should think about evaluating a person's circumstances to optimally design an investment portfolio.
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| 0:00.0 | Markets move fast. |
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| 0:20.0 | Podcastss Radio News |
| 0:22.4 | Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthall. |
| 0:37.5 | And I'm Tracy Allaway. |
| 0:39.0 | Tracy, I know like everyone is like really into what's the hot stock these days? InVIDIA, how do I play the AI boom? |
| 0:46.0 | It's interesting. You can make a lot of money and get the right stocks. I love the general topic though of just like optimal portfolio construction. |
| 0:53.1 | It seems like a fascinating puzzle to me, |
| 0:56.2 | how to fit different types of assets together in one coherent thing. It always felt to me like |
| 1:02.8 | a study in behavioral science almost because I think everyone always says, you know, just invest in |
| 1:08.5 | an index fund, maybe 6040, although as we saw in 2022, that has its own problems. And we can talk about that. But I think this is like the one area in people's lives where they actually crave complexity. Right. Like it doesn't sound right to be like, just put your money in an index fund and forget about it. I know. It's like the |
| 1:28.2 | simplest, it's like the simplest investing strategy is the hardest for people. It's really hard |
| 1:33.4 | though. Like when you see people making life changing an amount of money, it goes like, oh, |
| 1:37.3 | I was in, you know, Sandisk, right? And suddenly everyone wants memory because of AI and they're up 500% |
| 1:44.1 | in years like, damn, you know, like I'm really happy with my 12% year that I've been making. But I've really, it's really hard. |
| 1:51.8 | I was 100% invested in a leverage Doge ETF. Yeah, right. Like, if you did that and then you retired the next day, I'd be like really annoyed. I'd be like really upset. But it is a fun puzzle. You mentioned 20, 22 and we saw what we've seen really since COVID. What we've really seen since the worst inflation in 40 years is that some of these portfolio constructions that worked very well for a very long time, particularly anything that sort of resembles, that 60-40 thing, |
| 2:19.4 | which just worked so beautifully in the 2010s. |
... |
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