My original post was prompted by my recent uneasyness in the stock market. I'm afraid that having gone through the past few years of terrible returns, precisely at a time when I felt like I was making some serious headway toward saving for early retirement has me a bit rattled. Just as my account was approaching a tolerable rebound, the market seems to have turned south again, losing several pecentage points recently. I guess I was hoping for a magic bullet that would bring safety and modest growth. After reading all of your replies, it seems that the potential return that stock market risk ofers is the only way. As I originally mentioned, my asset allocation is currently 60/40 and that needs adjusting as I need to rebalance to 50/50. That being said, I guess I was luckier than most during the recent down turn due to my limited stock market exposure.