Four reference blends stand in for risk tolerance
The dropdown offers four fixed splits, and every one of them adds to 100%. Conservative is 25% stocks, 55% bonds and 20% cash - the most in bonds and the most in cash, in exchange for the least growth potential. Balanced is 60/30/10. Growth is 75/20/5. Aggressive is 85% stocks, 10% bonds and 5% cash, which is the largest stock share and the largest swings.
These are broad, commonly quoted starting points, not market forecasts, and the page prints no expected return for any of them. What you can read off the table is the direction of the trade: each step from conservative toward aggressive moves roughly fifteen points out of bonds and cash and into stocks. That is the decision being made, and seeing it as a row of numbers is more useful than remembering a rule of thumb like 100 minus your age.
The blend becomes money on your portfolio
Enter a portfolio value and each percentage is multiplied into dollars: the balance times the share, divided by a hundred. On the default $100,000 balanced blend, that is $60,000 of stocks, $30,000 of bonds and $10,000 of cash, and the same three amounts appear in the headline stats, the bar and the table so the allocation stops being an abstraction.
The shares are exact and the printed amounts are rounded to whole dollars, so a balance that does not divide evenly can leave the three figures a dollar away from the total - rounding, not a lost deposit. Money below zero is treated as zero, and a profile value the page does not recognize falls back to balanced rather than printing an empty mix. Every bucket is priced off the one balance you entered, so changing the profile re-splits the same money rather than re-sizing the portfolio.
The four blends are printed side by side to compare
A suggested percentage is only useful next to its alternatives, so the page prints all four rows - profile, stocks, bonds, cash - and marks the row you chose with a note that reads as yours. Reading down the stocks column from 25% to 85% alongside the cash column falling from 20% to 5% is the whole argument in one glance.
Put against real balances it is starker. A $250,000 portfolio on the conservative row puts $62,500 in stocks, $137,500 in bonds and $50,000 in cash. The same money on the growth row holds $187,500 in stocks. Neither row is right for everyone; the comparison exists so you can see how much stability you are handing over for the extra growth, in dollars rather than adjectives.
What a starting point is not
The page refuses to pretend a dropdown knows you. When you need the money, what else you own, whether a 30% drawdown would actually make you sell - none of that fits in a select box, and no responsible planner would compress it into one. There is no age input, no income input, and no goal input, because the answer would still be a guess dressed as arithmetic.
So the note says it plainly: this is a reference, not advice. What is missing is not an oversight but the parts that matter - expected returns, a rebalancing rule, the tax location of each holding across accounts, and the behavior of the person holding it. Treat the blend as an opening position to argue with, ideally alongside someone you pay to argue with you, rather than as a target to implement on its own.
Rebalancing is the part a dropdown cannot do
A blend is only a starting position; what keeps it a blend is rebalancing. Start at 60/30/10 on $100,000 and let a bad year take 30% off the stocks: the portfolio is now $58,000, of which stocks are $42,000 — 72% of the whole, not 60%. Nothing was bought or sold, and the risk has quietly risen. Selling about $7,000 of stocks back into bonds and cash restores the intended mix; doing nothing lets the plan drift into a different one, and the drift is always toward whatever has just gone up.
Two practical notes the page cannot print. First, a rebalance band of five percentage points is usually enough — rebalancing on every wobble costs in spreads and taxes what it saves in risk. Second, where the money sits matters as much as the split: holding bonds in a tax-deferred account and stocks in a taxable one changes the after-tax result of the same 60/30/10. And the blend here knows nothing about a pension, a home, or an emergency fund — those are real assets too, and a household with a large one can carry a more aggressive portfolio than its age alone would suggest.
Danfio