Interesting catch, Paul. If you look at the plan itself (E*Trade Commission-Free ETFs) there aren't a lot of fixed income options available in the list and all of them seem to be international. So, the first point here is that it's tough to get a truly low-risk, low correlation instrument within this list.
The chinese yuan is an edge case (ie. we don't classify it well because it's currently outside the granularity of our framework - that will change), but if you think about it, probably not a bad choice. The yuan is pegged to the U.S. dollar and has a return (unlike US money market).
So simply, yuan is being used as a U.S. fixed income proxy in this case. The benchmark for the conservative models is about 40% bonds, 60% stocks.
Tell you what you can do - subscribe to the model and add a U.S. treasury ETF (eg. TLT) to the list...then re-run the models. My hunch is you'll find it heavily weighted in the models.
The chinese yuan is an edge case (ie. we don't classify it well because it's currently outside the granularity of our framework - that will change), but if you think about it, probably not a bad choice. The yuan is pegged to the U.S. dollar and has a return (unlike US money market).
So simply, yuan is being used as a U.S. fixed income proxy in this case. The benchmark for the conservative models is about 40% bonds, 60% stocks.
Tell you what you can do - subscribe to the model and add a U.S. treasury ETF (eg. TLT) to the list...then re-run the models. My hunch is you'll find it heavily weighted in the models.