Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, the saying goes. And based on a recent Discuss forum thread on Morningstar.com, so is the optimal number of investments. On average, posters had 38 investments, with a median number of 29 holdings, but there was a wide dispersion. Poster Denden, who took the prize as "most acquisitive investor" with a whopping 586 holdings, noted, "it would be easy to handle more investments." But a healthy contingent of posters with much smaller lists of investments would like to be more streamlined, particularly as retirement draws closer. Bschutz calls a 27-investment portfolio--smaller than the median number of holdings volunteered by other users--"higher than ideal."The fact that most retirement savers multitask among several different vehicles--company retirement plans, IRAs, and taxable accounts--was a frequently cited reason for not being able to skinny down a portfolio even more. Other posters noted that, as holders of individual stocks and bonds rather than funds, they needed to maintain a more diffuse portfolio to achieve diversification.... Continue to read.
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