[jmartrican]

I use a pyramid method to investing. At the bottom is a large amount of municipal bonds (either directly or through funds). Maybe 2/3's of my portfolio is in bonds. Next is my pyramid is stock funds, mainly ETFs, distributed across multiple industry and asset classes. Mostly domestic but some international. At the top of the pyramid is individual stocks. I buy stocks of companies I know about. I dont do this actively but from my travels you pick up a hint or two ahead of the market. 2 examples of this; noticing how fast Tesla's China gigafactory came up but the market didnt notice yet, so scooped up Tesla at 250. Another is noticing top 10 CPUs on Amazon were AMD but no bump in their price, so scooped some up at $22 a share.

As I get closer to retirement, and my stock funds increase faster than my bond funds, I rebalance by just buying more bonds when I invest new money.

I'm not a gambler. I want to beat inflation for the bulk of my hard earned money, and have some in the market to take advantage of America's great economy. The other good benefit of bonds is that you can use it as a higher interest savings account, since they are pretty stable.