The Journal’s food desk has committed light heresy: a Niçoise salad with the tuna swapped out for another fish entirely. The purists will write letters. The dish, meanwhile, will be fine.
Here’s why it works, and why it’s worth sixty seconds of an investor’s attention: the dish survives because the structure was right — the salt, the acid, the egg, the olives, the architecture of the thing — not because one ingredient was irreplaceable.
Portfolios are Niçoise salads. No single holding should be load-bearing; the allocation is the recipe, the tickers are the fish. When Micron is unavailable at a sane price, the memory exposure rides through AVGO and TSM — same dish, different fish, structure intact.
A kitchen-table version of our sizing rule: the structure carries the dish, not any single ingredient. No holding should be load-bearing — when one name is unavailable at a sane price, the sleeve substitutes (memory exposure via AVGO/TSM while MU sits on the bench) and the recipe survives. If a portfolio can’t lose its tuna, it was never diversified.