I love salmon fishing. I love all sorts of fishing, but salmon fishing is special. Instead of the romantic image of fly fishing in a river, or the flashy idea of big-time bass fishing, or even the nostalgic memory of fishing off a rowboat with your grandpa, salmon fishing is more like a battle. Forget everything you know about traditional casting and reeling, salmon fishing involves rigging up multiple fishing rods, attaching them to downriggers and various mechanisms for getting the lures down deep, and a slow troll on open water. The key to catching fish has nothing to do with technique or sport, it’s about setting a broad array of bait covering many different depths. We call it a ‘spread.’ If you only had one or two rods you’d be poorly served, it’s simply not a sufficient level of depth diversification. Ideally, you want 8 to 12, or even 15 to 18 in the case of professional charter boats. Here’s a quick visual:

Notice how the lines are prudently spread across varying depths? Investing is the same way! Stick with me here; the water is the stock market, the lines/rods are investment dollars, and the different depths are asset classes. We don’t know which depth, or depths, will produce fish, we just know the fish swim all over the place and that if we’ve got a good spread (lines at different depths) we’re bound to catch something. Same with asset classes! We know that they all perform over time, but we don’t know which one is going to hit next year or which one will be best over the next 5 years. So we own all of them. Imagine how dumb it would be to have one line out in the water trolling for salmon, it makes no sense. Even if that one line is set at the depth that has produced the most fish over the last few weeks, it still doesn’t make sense. Fish move around all the time, why would you not want to cover the whole water column/stock market? Just like downriggers and multiple lines ‘enable the whole water column to be covered when trolling,’ diversification allows you to own the whole market when investing! No guesswork, no hoping, no predicting, no gut feelings, no casting lots, no anxiety, just well balanced, widely diversified investments. I’m not saying it’s easy, salmon fishing is a lot of work, but when you’re eating your salmon dinner at the end of it, you’ll be glad you diversified.