Time to rebalance, but it's worth noting a pet peeve of mine. It is more of an investing myth, an over-simplified statement restated into meaning without having as much strength behind it as it sounds like it has. The saying is "buy low, sell high," but that's the biggest myth of investing. For the most part, the real truth is that there no "sell high" in investing. Regardless when you sell, that money will go somewhere else, and it will then outpace the performance of the other investment -- or any other investment option at that given time. There are a couple exceptions: one of which is retirement where you are using the assets to live and the other is rebalancing. Rebalancing is the act of buying low, selling high, although the statement itself in the context of rebalancing is overly simplified and not the complete truth. As a myth, "buy low, sell high" provides more understand than a million other words would, so it is useful and reachable. But, at the same time, if you understand investing well enough, then the limitations of the advice make it less than useful.
That said, my quarterly rebalancing is all the more effective because it answers the question that would otherwise lead to "paralysis by analysis" (as Mo Ansari loves to say) of where to put the money sold high in order to get as much (or, ideally more) out of it than leaving it where it was.
This quarter, I got to see the international markets boom personally. I had been hearing about it, but I had yet to see the evidence as clearly as it is here.
I moved small amounts from Vanguard Total International Stock Index Fund and (perhaps surprisingly) Vanguard Explorer Fund and I split the sum among Vanguard High-Yield Fund, Vanguard PRIMECAP Fund, Vanguard Total Bond Index Fund (which, as of the end of last month is the largest bond fund in the world, overtaking Pimco Total Return Fund) and Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund (which has been the largest mutual fund in the world since overtaking Pimco Total Return Fund at some point in the past year or two).
