Depends on the stocks. Unlike many modern investors, I'm extremely uncomfortable with the idea of trading something as an asset class rather than as part ownership of a business. You end up doing things like investing in oil companies and investing directly in commodities, which is redundant -- the oil companies are basically a portfolio of call options on oil, where the strike price is the cost of extraction.
Think about it: if you told Andrew Carnegie you were putting "21.87%" of your money into "US Large Cap," he'd laugh his ass off. He'd ask why you knew, to four figures, what kind of stocks you were investing in, but didn't bother to talk about what they made, who ran them, or how much money they earned. He'd ask why you would prefer buying $100 million of cash flow for $2 billion rather than $1 billion, as an allocation based on market cap would have you do. Carnegie is a great example, because for a while he was purely an investor -- he had a diversified portfolio of stocks in companies whose management he knew personally, and he paid careful attention to their business performance and the dividends they paid, not their market price.
Don't do anything Carnegie, Morgan, or Rockefeller wouldn't recognize as an investment, and you should be okay.
I said specifically The accuracy (beyond decimal point) is certainly irrelevant, but it came right off a spreadsheet and I left it in because it sums to 100.
As for indexes vs individual stocks, I don't want to spend that much time worrying about (or tweaking) my investment portfolio.
So, for you, it depends on the stocks. But if you work backwards, where does that come out on an asset class basis? Are you buying no international equities? No commodities? No REITs? What are the actual %s?
Think about it: if you told Andrew Carnegie you were putting "21.87%" of your money into "US Large Cap," he'd laugh his ass off. He'd ask why you knew, to four figures, what kind of stocks you were investing in, but didn't bother to talk about what they made, who ran them, or how much money they earned. He'd ask why you would prefer buying $100 million of cash flow for $2 billion rather than $1 billion, as an allocation based on market cap would have you do. Carnegie is a great example, because for a while he was purely an investor -- he had a diversified portfolio of stocks in companies whose management he knew personally, and he paid careful attention to their business performance and the dividends they paid, not their market price.
Don't do anything Carnegie, Morgan, or Rockefeller wouldn't recognize as an investment, and you should be okay.