need portfolio advice

Only you can know the answer to this question. There is no one single answer for everyone.

That's fine. Typical, even conservative at your age. It ultimately depends on your personal level of risk tolerance. If you don't mind watching stuff go up and down in the short run, you have plenty of time before you need to be more conservative. As long as you're in broad indexes, you're fine. Joe Weinstein

We're going to need a hell of a lot more information to make even the most vague guess as to whether that's sensible or not. Current savings, years planned until retirement (or other goals for the money), income, etc.

Assuming you have *everything* else in order (ie. no credit card debt, emergency funds in place, savings set aside for other things (ie. house, car, etc) and that this is *only* very-long-term retirement money which you aren't planning on touching until you are

65 (you said you're 31, right?) then, it may in fact be *under* aggressive. With a 34 year time horizon, for this particular batch of money, you may not need *any* bonds.

See, for example, the asset allocation used by Vanguard themselves in their target-retirement funds. Vanguard's 2040 retirement plan (33 years from now) has only 10% in bonds.

(Look up VFORX on, say, finance.yahoo.com)

T.Rowe's 2040 fund has 7.23% in bonds and 4.25% in cash.

Fido's 2040 has 11.8% in bonds, 3.5% in cash

But, again, your question is kind of without enough context.

I don't see a need to focus specifically on Canada, and yes you are in Canada. If you're in the broad U.S. stock market, lots of companies do business in Canada, so their results will be affected by the vicissitudes of Canada in it's proportion. Your stocks could all be in VIPERs and one international index and be done, unless you know that some aspect of the market is going to do better than another... (good luck)... Joe Weinstein

snipped-for-privacy@fractious.net, pithy and didactic as usual, opined thusly:

I respectfully differ. A 85/15 mix for a 31 year old investor will reduce volatility and make it easier to him to invest over the long haul without panicking if equities hit a rough stretch. As they say on the Street, you make money in stocks, but you keep it in bonds. Sure, the long term return on an 85/15 portfolio will be a little less than going 100 percent equities. But the reduction in volatility is worth it in my view.

So the original poster's 85/15 allocation is reasonably close to what the pros are doing. That should reassure him.

The original poster also asked if having 23 percent of his equity money invested in international stocks was overly aggressive. I don't think so. Most of the model asset allocations out there suggest having 20-30 percent of your equity money invested in international names. As for targeting Canada specifically, I don't think that's necessary. Canadian equities are probably well correlated to U.S. issues, so you add complexity without getting diversification.

All in all, the original poster is doing just fine. Just remember to save as much as possible.