(Disclaimer: I’m a financial professional, but I’m not anyone’s investment advisor, much less yours.)
You mention diversity as an advantage because it reduces your risk, but this framing is missing the crucial point that you can transmute a portfolio that’s 0.5x as risky as your baseline to one that returns twice as much as your baseline. (Wei_Dai mentions this, but obliquely.) The trick is to use leverage, which is not as hard to get (or as expensive, or as complicated) as you think.
To be explicit about it: if you increase the per-dollar riskiness of your portfolio without increasing the per-dollar expected value, then after you leverage it down until it’s at the optimal level of risk for your utility function (which you were going to do, right?), you will have lower expected returns.
The relevant question is “how much lower?” (which is precisely to say “how much does it increase your per-dollar risk?”), which I answer in my response to Wei_Dai (nephew to this). The answer turns out to be “very little”, but in order to get there, you have to be asking the right question first.
(Disclaimer: I’m a financial professional, but I’m not anyone’s investment advisor, much less yours.)
You mention diversity as an advantage because it reduces your risk, but this framing is missing the crucial point that you can transmute a portfolio that’s 0.5x as risky as your baseline to one that returns twice as much as your baseline. (Wei_Dai mentions this, but obliquely.) The trick is to use leverage, which is not as hard to get (or as expensive, or as complicated) as you think.
To be explicit about it: if you increase the per-dollar riskiness of your portfolio without increasing the per-dollar expected value, then after you leverage it down until it’s at the optimal level of risk for your utility function (which you were going to do, right?), you will have lower expected returns.
The relevant question is “how much lower?” (which is precisely to say “how much does it increase your per-dollar risk?”), which I answer in my response to Wei_Dai (nephew to this). The answer turns out to be “very little”, but in order to get there, you have to be asking the right question first.