I'VE RECENTLY MADE the most significant change to my own portfolio in thirty five years. For the first time I've moved away from pure market-cap investing, tilting meaningfully toward Europe and Southeast Asia and bringing my US technology concentration down to around fifteen percent. I'm retired. I don't need to chase the outperformance that concentration might deliver, and I don't need the potential volatility that comes with it. This is a personal position rather than any kind of recommendation; it's nothing more than a risk management decision made at a point in life where I simply don't need the risk. What prompted it was a growing discomfort with something I suspect many everyday investors haven't fully reckoned with: the S&P 500 is no longer quite the animal it once was. A broad market index fund casts a wide net across the economy, and the S&P 500, which tracks the 500 largest US businesses by market value, has long been held up as the sensible default: low cost, well diversified, a bet on the whole rather than any one part of it. A sector fund works differently; it makes a deliberate, concentrated bet on a specific industry. If you believe technology is going to outperform the market as a whole, it gives you the ability to concentrate your capital into exactly the sector your research or gut instinct suspects is going to be the place to be and let it run. The theory behind each is straightforward enough. A broad market fund captures a larger slice of the investment universe and is generally considered the lower-risk path. A sector fund comes with a well-understood trade-off: higher potential returns in good times, sharper drawdowns when sentiment turns. Investors who consciously choose a technology sector fund know what they're signing up for. The risk profile is understood, accepted, and priced into the decision. The problem is that the line between these two things has become a bit fuzzy, and most everyday investors haven't noticed. A handful of technology and technology-related companies (Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, Meta, Alphabet) have grown so dominant in their market valuations that they now represent a disproportionate share of the entire index. During the last year, the top ten holdings have accounted for roughly a third of the total weight of all 500 companies. The mechanism behind this is simply how the index works. The S&P 500 is market-cap weighted, meaning the bigger the company, the bigger its slice of the pie. As technology companies scaled their dominance through the 2010s and into the 2020s, their weight within the index ballooned accordingly. The index didn't change its rules; the market just rewarded one particular group of companies so heavily that they came to dominate the scoreboard. This means the investor who bought the S&P 500 believing they were spreading risk broadly across the American economy (energy, healthcare, financials, industrials, consumer staples) owns something that looks quite different to the story they were sold. You buy five hundred companies and a third of your money lands in ten stocks, most of them operating in the same broad technological ecosystem. That is a concentration risk, whether it is labelled as one or not. It's a sector fund “light”, acquired by stealth through the natural mechanics of market-cap weighting. The issue is that millions of everyday investors are carrying a version of that same risk without necessarily knowing it. Although I've used the S&P 500 as an example here, it isn't alone. Most broad-based indexes including developed world trackers will exhibit the same characteristics to varying degrees, because the same companies sit near the top of those indexes too. The MSCI World, often marketed as the global diversifier, allocates somewhere in the region of seventy percent to US equities, and within that, the familiar names reappear. You can cross borders on paper without ever really leaving the room. None of this is an argument against the S&P 500. The concentration reflects real, earned dominance; these companies grew to the top of the index because they genuinely deserved to. And whether my reallocation turns out to be the right call is genuinely unknowable. The concentrated index could continue to outperform for another decade and I'll have left returns on the table, a real possibility I've made my peace with. The point isn't that I've found the correct answer. The point is that I had the information to make a considered choice, weighed it against my own circumstances, and acted accordingly. That's all any investor can do. The uncomfortable truth is that a great many people haven't been given the chance to do the same. They're holding a product that has quietly changed its character, and nobody has thought to mention it. Better information doesn't guarantee better decisions, but it at least puts the decision where it belongs: with the person whose money it is. ___ Mark Crothers is a retired small business owner from the UK with a keen interest in personal finance and simple living. Married to his high school sweetheart, with daughters and grandchildren, he knows the importance of building a secure financial future. With an aversion to social media, he prefers to spend his time on his main passions: reading, scratch cooking, racket sports, and hiking.

I WAS THINKING ABOUT Jonathan the other day on my morning walk, which happens more often than you might think. It’s hard not to think about him when you have HumbleDollar coasters in your living room and a HumbleDollar shopping bag in your car that you use for groceries. My wife confiscated the HumbleDollar cup I had been using for my morning tea, and it now has a new home in our bathroom holding her toothbrush and toothpaste. There’s even an apron somewhere in the house that Jonathan once sent to all the writers. Ever since I started writing for HumbleDollar in 2017, Jonathan has influenced my retirement. I now own the Vanguard Total World Stock Index Fund (symbol: VT) in my investment portfolio because of his recommendation. He liked it for its “broad global diversification in one low-cost fund that covers virtually all publicly traded companies worldwide.” It struck me as a good way to simplify our holdings. I didn’t just borrow some of Jonathan’s investment ideas; I also borrowed some of his words he used when editing my articles. I began peppering my writing with words like fret, upshot, and folks. He once told me, “While your grammar is occasionally a bit dodgy, you have a great ear for language.” I was too embarrassed to ask him what he meant by a “great ear for language.” When I retired, I never imagined that writing for HumbleDollar would become such a big part of my retirement, and I’m grateful to Jonathan for that. I also didn’t think my retirement would be so fluid. I pictured something far more stable: remaining single, living in a one-bedroom condo, and fending for myself. My life now is different. I’m married and live in a three-bedroom home in another city. One of the biggest changes, however, has nothing to do with geography. It has to do with money—specifically, how financial decisions change when there are two people instead of one. I learned that lesson early in our marriage. We got married in August 2020. That December, I woke up one morning and saw blood in my urine. I went to an urologist who ran a series of tests, but it took about a month to determine the cause.   During that time, I decided to consolidate our remaining investment holdings to make things easier for Rachel to manage in case something happened to me. Most of our money was already at Vanguard, except for a 401(k) from my former employer that was invested in a stable value fund. It still held a significant balance. Without much hesitation, I moved it into a bond fund at Vanguard. Not too long afterward, the bond market nosedived. The fund performed poorly—especially compared to the stable value fund the money had been in. The upshot: I panicked—and paid for it. It wasn’t a good time to make a financial decision while I was under stress. Some of the worst money moves happen when emotions are running high—selling stocks at the bottom of a bear market or rushing to act after an unexpected windfall. More often than not, it’s better to wait until you’re clearheaded before making a decision. At the time, I was also fretting about whether Rachel would qualify for my Social Security benefit, which is much larger than hers. You have to be married for at least nine months. I found myself counting off the days. Another financial decision became more complicated simply because we were now a couple: what to do with the three properties we owned—my condo, Rachel’s house, and the house I had inherited. Neither of us wanted to be landlords at this stage of our lives. We were excited about getting married and starting a new life together. I decided to sell my condo during the pandemic, which wasn’t easy. Rather than wait, I accepted an offer of $380,000—$43,000 below the asking price. Rachel decided to wait and rent out her house for two years. She didn’t get caught up in the excitement or rush into selling. As it turned out, that patience paid off. When the for-sale sign finally went up, I would stop by the house to water the yard and rake the falling leaves. One day, a real estate agent and his client were there looking at the property. They kept asking me whether the price listed on the brochure was correct. Rachel’s agent had intentionally priced the house at the lower end of the range in hopes of creating a bidding war. I told them they would have to talk to my wife and her agent because it wasn’t my house. The agent asked how long we had been married. When I told him two years, he nodded and said, “I get it. She wanted to wait until she was sure about the marriage before selling the house.” Rachel laughed when I told her what he said. She wasn’t waiting to see if the marriage would work. She waited because selling a house is a major financial decision, and she didn’t see any reason to rush it. Two years later, the timing turned out to be just right. The market had improved and the strategy worked exactly as planned. There were multiple offers, and the final sale price was well above what it would have been earlier. At the time my wife sold her house, Zillow’s estimated price of my condo was $484,000—$104,000 more than I received. I don’t really know why I was in such a rush to sell. Maybe it had something to do with the pandemic, my mother’s recent death, my sister and brother-in-law moving out of state, or the stress of renovating our new house. It was an emotional time for me, and I was probably searching for some stability in my life. What I’ve learned—both from Jonathan and from being married—is that good financial decisions usually come from patience, not urgency. When I feel anxious or pressured to act, I’m more likely to make a mistake. When I slow down, think things through, and listen—especially to my wife—the outcome is usually better. Managing money well isn’t about always making the right move. It’s about avoiding the wrong ones—and knowing when to wait.  Dennis Friedman retired from Boeing Satellite Systems after a 30-year career in manufacturing. Born in Ohio, Dennis is a California transplant with a bachelor’s degree in history and an MBA. A self-described “humble investor,” he likes reading historical novels and about personal finance. Follow Dennis on X @DMFrie and check out his earlier articles.