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The Death of the 60/40 Portfolio?

Why Smart Money Is Rethinking Investing

Matt | Financial Imagineer

6 min readMay 13, 2026

Press enter or click to view image in full size Photo by Joshua Aragon on Unsplash

For decades, institutional investing followed a fairly predictable script: Carve the portfolio into neat little boxes — stocks here, bonds there, real estate somewhere off to the side — and rebalance every quarter like clockwork. It was orderly. Familiar. Comforting, even.

Then the world changed.

Inflation came roaring back.

Interest rates swung wildly.

Geopolitical shocks became routine.

Private markets exploded in size.

And suddenly, the old investing playbook started looking a bit like using a paper map in the age of GPS.

That’s the core idea behind Brookfield’s fascinating new white paper, “The Allocation Evolution: The Emergence of Total Portfolio Approach Investing.” And while the title sounds academic enough to induce a nap, the underlying message is anything but…