Big Rocks Highly Aggressive Portfolio by Larry Swedroe
The Big Rocks Highly Aggressive Portfolio is the highest-risk variant in Larry Swedroe's "Big Rocks" model allocation series. Swedroe, the former Director of Research at Buckingham Strategic Wealth and author of numerous books on evidence-based investing, designed these portfolios to apply factor-based equity tilts within a clearly structured asset allocation framework. The highly aggressive version is almost entirely in equities, with strong tilts toward small-cap and value stocks.
Investment Philosophy
Swedroe's philosophy holds that investors should accept only the risks they are compensated for taking, and that the equity risk premium is best captured not through plain market-cap weighting but through deliberate tilts toward the size and value factors identified in academic research by Eugene Fama and Kenneth French. At the aggressive end of his spectrum, this means concentrating the portfolio in the parts of the equity market with the highest expected long-run returns — small-cap value stocks globally — while accepting the higher short-term volatility that comes with them.
Who It's For
This portfolio is suited to investors with a very high risk tolerance, a long time horizon (typically fifteen or more years), and genuine conviction in the factor investing thesis. It is not appropriate for investors who may need to access funds in the near term or who are likely to abandon the strategy during a prolonged period of underperformance.
Pros
- Maximum equity exposure and strong factor tilts offer the highest expected long-run returns in Swedroe's framework
- Global diversification across factor-tilted equity sleeves reduces single-country concentration risk
- Grounded in decades of academic research on the size and value premiums
Cons
- Very high volatility and potentially severe drawdowns during equity bear markets
- Factor tilts — particularly toward small-cap value — can underperform broad indices for years at a time
- Requires a high degree of behavioural discipline to hold through extended periods of underperformance relative to simpler portfolios
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Target Allocation
Performance Snapshot
Rolling Returns
| Period | Low | Average | High |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 Year | -47.7% | +10.7% | +65.5% |
| 3 Year | -17.4% | +8.9% | +29.6% |
| 5 Year | -5.3% | +8.6% | +23.6% |
| 10 Year | +2.1% | +8.4% | +14.8% |
Growth of $10,000
Historical Drawdown
Percentage decline from the portfolio's peak value at each point in time.
Rolling Returns
Annualised return for each rolling period ending on that date.
Annualised return for each 1Y period ending on that date.