Subject: Re: Yikes, that’s a lot of cash
For once I am very much in agreement with you!

Normally I would say something like "everybody is over-reacting to the size of the cash pile, it's not unusually large as a fraction of the size of the firm".

But this time it is. The normal high end of the range has gone up to about 36% of investments, and touched 39% twice. One of those times was during the pandemic so the number was distorted by the temporarily low market value of the equity portfolio. But the latest figure calculated the same way is 45%, which is indeed a pretty big fraction.

My own cash allocation is 68% at the moment, but it's not as if I'm moving around billions.

Of course, the rising cash percentage is primarily the flipside of falling allocations to fixed income. Equities as a percent of investments per share are 47%, pretty much spot on the 20 year average.

The equity allocation is lower than the 5 years average a pinch over 60%, but it's not a historically unusual level. At a high level the last few years, including this quarter, could be viewed mainly as a story of moving almost all of the fixed income allocation to the extremely short duration end, which we call cash, while keeping the allocation to equities in the usual 30%-60% range. We're in the middle of that range.

Jim