Lazy portfolio

Couch Potato Portfolio

Scott Burns, Dallas Morning News, 1991

Two funds, 50/50, US stocks and US bonds, rebalanced once a year. Burns published it as a benchmark for active managers. Most of them still lose to it.

Allocation

50%

50% · US Total Market
50% · US Aggregate Bond

Weighted expense ratio

0.030%

Across the 2 of 2 slices we could price.

Weighted tax efficiency

/100, weighted by allocation. Lower in heavy-bond portfolios.

Slices

Number of holdings — also the number of lots you rebalance.

Implementation

Weight	Role	Ticker	Fund	ER	AUM	Score
50%	US Total Market	VTI	Vanguard Morningstar Total Stock Market ETF	0.030%	$2.32T^†	92
50%	US Aggregate Bond	BND	Vanguard Total Bond Market Index Fund ETF Shares	0.030%	$389.05B^†	89

† Whole fund: this ETF is one share class of a fund that also sells mutual-fund shares, and the figure covers all of them. Our sources don't report the ETF class on its own.

VTI · alternates: ITOT
BND · alternates: AGG

Editorial take

The Couch Potato is best understood as a teaching portfolio rather than an optimal one. The lack of international exposure leaves it concentrated in a single country's equity market — an unusual choice for anyone who didn't inherit a strong home-country bias.

Try the Couch Potato Portfolio in our tools

Tool · Look-through

Underlying holdings of this mix

Every underlying position summed across the slices — true top holdings, country and sector tilt, bond sleeve.

Tool · Placement

Split this portfolio across your accounts

Asset-location optimizer — fills tax-deferred with shelter-priority slices first, Roth with growth-priority next, taxable last. Estimated annual tax drag.

Tool · Backtester

Backtest this portfolio's last 5 years

Monthly total returns rebalanced monthly. Equity curve, CAGR, max drawdown.

Compare the slices

See holdings overlap and cost difference between any two of this portfolio's funds.

VTI vs BND

Open Couch Potato Portfolio holdings at a brokerage

All 2 slices in this portfolio trade commission-free at major brokerages.

Open at Fidelity

Affiliate links — opening an account through these earns PlainIndex a one-time referral. Scoring is computed before any affiliate consideration; see our methodology and funding disclosure.

Curated allocation. The funds listed are how this portfolio would be built using the catalog as it stands today; alternate tickers and notes are flagged inline.

PlainIndex publishes data and editorial commentary — nothing here is personalized investment advice. Read the methodology for how the scores referenced here are computed.