Boglehead or active, which one are you?
The sort that predicts which style you'll stick with.
Start the quiz →What this quiz explores
The index versus active argument is usually fought over evidence, which is the less interesting half. The better question is which approach you'll still be following in year seven, because a strategy you abandon in year three beats nothing.
How it works
The quiz has 3 possible results. Each answer option was written to lean toward one of them.
Your result is the one your answers pointed to most often. Skipped questions, and the occasional answer that does not lean toward any result, are not counted.
Alongside the result you see your answer profile: the share of your answers that pointed to each result. Close percentages mean you sit between two results, which is common.
The three investing temperaments
The Committed Indexer
You've read the evidence, you've built the boring thing, and the boring thing has stopped costing you any effort.
Broad funds, low fees, contributions on a schedule, almost no trading. You find investing uninteresting and you've arranged matters so that this is an advantage rather than a problem. The long-running comparisons of active funds against their benchmarks keep pointing the same direction, and you've simply acted on that rather than arguing with it. The trap isn't your portfolio, it's everything around it. Indexers develop a settled feeling about money in general, and the settled feeling extends to areas the index doesn't cover: the emergency fund that hasn't been resized since your expenses grew, the insurance nobody has reviewed, the will, the old account still sitting in a default fund from a job you left. Give the discipline somewhere else to go. Once a year, spend the hour you don't spend on stock picking auditing the boring infrastructure instead, since that's where your remaining financial risk lives. And decide in advance what you'll do during a long flat stretch, because the one thing that breaks indexers is a decade where the approach feels like it isn't working and no single day tells you to stop.
The Restless Indexer
You index because you don't trust yourself, which is a sound reason and an uncomfortable place to live.
You know the evidence and you follow it, and it bores you. Somewhere in the last few years you bought a couple of things you'd rather not discuss, or you paused contributions during a bad month, and those lapses are what convinced you to keep the strategy simple. Your beliefs and your temperament are pointed in different directions, and you've resolved the tension by overruling your temperament. The trap is that suppressed urges don't decay, they accumulate, and they tend to discharge at the worst moment: a large impulsive decision after a long stretch of restraint, usually near a market top when the itch is strongest. Willpower is a bad long-term architecture for anything. Build a release valve instead of gritting your teeth. Set aside a small sleeve, five percent or less, and permit yourself to do whatever you like inside it, with the rule that no new money is added when it shrinks. Most people find the urge is satisfied by having somewhere legitimate to put it. Keep a record of every decision in that sleeve with your reasoning, and read it a year later; that log tends to settle the question permanently.
Core and Satellite
You've built the compromise on purpose, and the whole thing depends on the wall between the two halves holding.
Most of your money sits in cheap, broad funds you don't touch, and a defined slice is where you express opinions. It's an arrangement that respects the evidence and your own nature at the same time, and it works better than either pure approach for people who want to stay engaged without betting their retirement on their engagement. The trap is leakage. Satellites grow, in two ways: they grow when they win and nobody trims them, and they grow because a good run makes the case for a larger allocation feel obvious. Meanwhile the wall gets softer, until one day the core has opinions in it too. The second issue is measurement, since almost nobody in this bucket knows whether the satellite has earned its costs. Write down the maximum percentage, and treat breaching it as a mechanical sell rather than a judgment call. Then benchmark the satellite honestly: compare it against what the same money would have done in the core fund, including taxes and trading costs, once a year. If it's behind after several years, you've learned something valuable and cheap. If it's ahead, you'll know that rather than assuming it.
What this quiz can’t tell you
- It does not know your income, debts, taxes, dependents or goals, and any real decision turns on those.
- It sorts you by how you answered a set of general questions. It is not a financial plan and it is not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold anything.
- Markets and personal circumstances change. A result that fits today may not fit next year.
Read more about how our quizzes are created, including how scoring works and what we do and do not claim.