The financial press, a collective of desperate scribes who spent their youth failing at poetry and their adulthood failing at math, has stumbled upon a 'new' revelation: the 25/25/25/25 portfolio. It’s marketed as 'eccentric,' which is financial-speak for 'we’re so bored of the standard misery that we’ve decided to dress it up in a clown suit.' This strategy, for those who haven’t been paying attention to the various ways the universe conspires to steal your lunch, suggests a neat, quad-split allocation between stocks, bonds, gold, and cash. It is, essentially, the financial equivalent of a child arranging their vegetables in alphabetical order while the house is on fire. It is meant to be the 'Permanent Portfolio,' a safety net for those who believe that if they just divide their failures into four equal buckets, they can somehow outsmart the void.

Consider the 'Stock' portion of this quadrangle of despair. Equities are the ultimate expression of human delusion—a belief that we can continue to extract 'value' from a planet that is currently sweating through its third consecutive 'hottest year on record.' When you buy stocks, you are buying a tiny piece of a corporation that is either lobbying to make your drinking water flammable or automating your actual job into oblivion. It’s a beautiful system, really. You invest in your own obsolescence and call it 'growth.' The Left decries the corporate greed while checking their 401ks with trembling fingers; the Right worships the ticker tape as if it were a digital god that actually cares about their mortgage. Both are equally pathetic, clinging to the hope that a line going up on a screen will compensate for the fact that they have no soul.

Then we have 'Bonds,' the financial instrument for people who find the color beige overstimulating. To buy a bond is to essentially lend money to a government that is thirty trillion dollars in the hole, trusting that they will pay you back in three decades with currency that will likely be used as emergency kindling. It is a high-stakes game of 'I Promise,' played with people who lie for a living. The 'stability' of bonds is a myth sold to the risk-averse, who are so terrified of the market’s volatility that they would rather watch their wealth slowly evaporate in a low-interest kiln than risk a sudden drop. It’s the slow-motion car crash of investing, and the 25/25/25/25 strategy treats it as a pillar of wisdom.

Then there’s gold. Ah, the yellow metal. The favorite fetish of the tinfoil-hat brigade and the elderly men who watch too much late-night basic cable. Gold is the 'investment' for people who have given up on civilization but still want to be rich when the cannibals eventually take over. They imagine a world where the internet is gone, the power grid is a memory, and yet, for some inexplicable reason, a post-apocalyptic warlord will still want to trade their precious canned peaches for a shiny rock. It’s a staggering lack of imagination. If the world ends, your gold is just a very heavy paperweight that you can’t eat. It’s a hedge against reality, which is the only thing these 'eccentric' investors are actually trying to avoid.

Finally, we have 'Cash,' the ultimate admission of defeat. Cash is the money you keep in the bank because you’re too terrified to play the game but too unimaginative to do anything else. It sits there, slowly dissolving under the corrosive heat of inflation, losing its purchasing power while you sleep. The 25/25/25/25 portfolio isn't an 'investment strategy'; it’s a suicide note written in quarterly reports. It’s the desperate attempt of the modern 'investor'—a term that now encompasses anyone with a smartphone and a gambling addiction—to find some semblance of order in a market that behaves like a drunk toddler on a unicycle. We are obsessed with these ratios because they provide the illusion of control. If we can just get the percentages right, we think, we can survive the collapse.

The truth, which is far too heavy for the average financial columnist to lift, is that this strategy 'beats the rest' only because 'the rest' is a swirling vortex of incompetence. It is the smartest kid in the remedial class. It’s winning a race where every other participant has already tripped over their own shoelaces and died of a heart attack. The financial industry has to keep inventing these 'eccentric' labels to justify its own parasitic existence. If they told you the truth—that the game is rigged and the house always wins—you might stop paying management fees. So go ahead, rebalance your assets. Move your digital crumbs from one column to the other. Pretend that your 25 percent allocation to gold will save you. The industry will thank you for the transaction fees, and I will be here, watching with the same weary disdain, as you realize that a pie chart is not a life raft.