Bank of America’s ‘sleep like a baby’ portfolio is having its best year since 1933: Chart of the Day

Sun, April 26, 2026 at 9:30 AM EDT 2 min read

The kind of portfolio built for peace of mind, not bragging rights, is suddenly crushing it.

The four-way 25/25/25/25 mix — split evenly across stocks, bonds, cash, and commodities — is tracking a 26% gain this year, which would mark its best annual return since 1933, according to a note from Bank of America’s Michael Hartnett.

That’s a striking result for a portfolio built to do the opposite of chasing the market. Instead of loading up on one hot trade, it spreads the bet across growth, defense, liquidity, and hard assets — and in this tape, all four have contributed.

The bigger story is what that says about asset allocation in 2026. BofA’s framework is also posting its third-best outperformance versus a classic 60/40 stocks-and-bonds portfolio in a century, a sign that the market backdrop is rewarding broader diversification again.

That also helps explain why commodities sit at the center of this year’s story. Stocks have participated, bonds have done their job, and cash still pays. But commodities have been the real differentiator, giving the portfolio a tailwind that a traditional 60/40 mix simply does not have.

Hartnett had already been making the broader case earlier this year. In his January 29 Flow Show report, he called 25/25/25/25 a “sleep like a baby” portfolio and framed the 2020s as a market regime favoring that mix over the classic 60/40 split.

The irony is that many investors still appear underexposed to the very sleeve driving the gap. If strong returns start pulling more allocators toward commodities and other hard assets, the boring portfolio that’s already putting up a 1933 kind of year may have even more room to run.

The idea has roots in Harry Browne’s Permanent Portfolio, a decades-old strategy built around equal weights in stocks, long-term US Treasury bonds, cash, and gold, though BofA’s current version uses a broader commodities sleeve.

Investors looking to approximate those four components can do so in several ways, though not with the exact instruments BofA used in its own work. The examples below are simply large, liquid ETFs that map loosely onto the portfolio’s stock, bond, cash, and commodities buckets. They are not recommendations, nor are they a replica of BofA’s model.

Jared Blikre is the global markets and data editor for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on X at @SPYJared or email him at jaredblikre@yahooinc.com.