Deciding how much you should own in stocks is never an easy decision, regardless of your age. Owning just stocks can make for gut-wrenching ups and downs in your portfolio, but owning just bonds won’t provide enough growth. How to properly balance the two is a question that investors grapple with every day. Which is why people find simple asset allocation models appealing.

One of the most popular models is the 60/40 model, which says you should have 60% in stocks and 40% in bonds, and you should periodically rebalance. Many balanced funds that use variants of this model rebalance quarterly. So, after quarters such as the one just passed, when stocks have made small gains and bonds have been unchanged, there will be some ‘rebalancing’ activity in the market at the beginning of the following quarter. That means these balanced funds will sell some stocks (to get back to 60%) and reallocate that money to bonds.

But there is truly nothing magic about 60/40. In fact, investors of a certain age may remember 70/30 being considered a more appropriate target for balancing the risks of stocks and bonds.