Thank you Charlie.

Putting together a good fixed income or equity portfolio using individual bonds and stocks requires a lot of financial knowledge, hard work, and confidence in one's abilities--especially when everything is going to hell. It takes a lot of time also.

OTOH putting together a good fixed income or equity portfolio using indexed bond and stock funds or ETFs is easy; does not require an ability to read financial statements; and the only buying and selling that needs to be done is to rebalance the portfolio's main (stocks/bonds) and sub-main components (lg, small, foreign stock/bond funds/ETFs) every one to five years.

At least for stocks, the lazy way, i.e. taking the market average via index funds or ETFs turns out to be a very, very smart strategy. As far as my stock investing goes, I am a convinced disciple of John Bogle and William Bernstein.

The big question here: is a lazy, fixed income strategy, using indexed bond funds or ETFs to obtain the market average return, a very very smart strategy also?