VTI
Vanguard Morningstar Total Stock Market ETF
stock NYSE ETF

VTI having a great day too.

VOO and VTI has a ton of overlap

>VTI is up about 20% in total return over 5 years.
Are you sure?
It's more like 74%.

Sure, you could save $10 a year (in exchange for loss of liquidity) but the thing you're completely missing about "swapping" to other funds is the enormous tax cost. I've been holding VOO and VTI for over fifteen years. Selling and exchanging to an identical fund that has 01% lower expense ratio would be absurd.

There are other momentum ETF's if you want faster rotation, I hold both SPMO and FMTM along with VOO, VTI, VGT (which has smoked all of them on the 10Y).
VOO and chill is over there -> r/Bogleheads.

Dump SCHG as that's basically just VOO (.93 correlation).
You don't need dividends unless you're trying to generate income. I'm not sure what the obsession is with them.
Dividend funds have their place, but not in a retirement portfolio at 28 (or 38, or 48 really...maybe 58). You're sacrificing performance/growth for income and you don't need income anytime soon.
I'd go 70/30 VTI/VXUS (or really just 100% VT) and chill.

Being concerned about a market crash that coincides with your planned retirement date is very reasonable; that risk is what is formally called "sequence of returns risk" and you can find a lot of discussion about it pretty much anywhere that serious investing topics are discussed. The simplest way to mitigate the risk is to adjust your asset allocation to accept lower potential returns in exchange for less volatility, typically with a bond fund allocation like BND if you want to keep it in the Vanguard family.
Notably however, this risk is NOT a result of the concentration of your portfolio into just 1 or 2 funds if those funds are diversified index funds like VT, VTI, or VXUS. You would have the approximately the same risk if your portfolio was invested in 5 funds or even 50 funds if the funds were all equity based.

A very important decision for you is to transfer out of EJ to one of the low cost brokerages.
Go with a Bogle passive investment like VTI.

Looks pretty good tbh. Only thing I noticed is you've got a lot of overlap between VOO, VTI, QQQM, VGT and SMH, so u're pretty heavy on tech. If that's on purpose, then fair enough.
The gold/silver positions are the part I'd probably rethink. Holding something just bcoz it's down can turn into a trap. Is there a reason you still want to own GDX, GLD and SLV? or are you mainly waiting to get back to even??

Remember, nothing is a true gain or true loss until they get out.
With VT, VTI, VOO types of decision, you are betting that over time that overall greed will find a way regardless of what happens to individual stocks.
No one is suggesting you bail on a pre-Boglehead stock. They are merely suggesting that when it's time to rebalance, start moving the gains to your fav etf's rather than into cash to later reinvest to other stocks.
The problem with gains is a false sense of how good you are at stock picking. If your fav stock dropped 7% in a day, what you do? What if it had been sliding 20% off its all time high in week prior? What if it was at all time highs, suddenly drops, but you could somehow be certain it was about to continue to drop for 6 months?
Knowing when to sell, being confident enough in that decision to ride the emotional waves if you were wrong - that is the grind of stocks we just don't care to spend our emotional time riding. Maybe you can weather wild swings, hold for the long term, and be ok. Sears, Toys-R-Us, stable companies everyone knew in the 80's are poof gone. The stock market still exists. And anyone with covid cash who jumped in low, is grinning big at their "boring" gains.
Maybe you are interested in becoming a professional. We aren't. It is a life of numbers, researching businesses, and regularly making high stakes decisions. We have far more fun things to do.
We simply ride their gains.
Between the winners and losers, we win (because the overall market goes up). Even when they lose, we win (because the overall market goes down). Our fav's go on sale and we keep buying. Thus amplifying our future gains when the market inevitably corrects back upward and eventually chases all time market highs again.
If you're still not convinced, what % of your portfolio do you want to experiment with? Aim toward that goal. Once reached, decide what % of your investment budget you want to allocate for betting on individual stocks. None of us would advise wasting time and money on that. But maybe you need room to experiment and understand what happens inside you personally when a stock goes sideways. What level of worry, fretting are you willing to live with?
You called them "mistakes". But how are you defining that? If you make 8%, is that a mistake? If you make 20% instead of 50%, is that a mistake or can you a still see the giant win? Get clearer on your risk tolerance and how you perceive things. The gambling addicts that make up some of the wsb community - do their wild ideas infect your own sensibilities or are they reflecting them? They are ok losing big because they chase the winners high. Is that the life you want? Find your own values and how your portfolio can best reflect that.
FOMO is allowing others to decide for you how to live your life.
If those people were all on mute/pause, what do you want instead? Follow You. FOMO is for those unable to think for themselves.
We won't FOMO you here. You already know you're trading away steady gains over time. What could we say to make that scare the crap out of you? If you have an answer to that, there's your answer. It was inside you the whole time.

You are making the classic mistake of thinking holding more funds automatically adds more diversification. The holdings of VT or VTI+VXUS makes it about as diversified as you can get and much more diversified then you would be if you added more funds that would cause overlap.

Thanks! I hold no delusions about being fully diversified in that VTI vs. VOO mix. The VTI is there to figure what else to buy, but with so much tech everywhere, I might just dump that in favor of all VOO. That and VGT are almost all of my ETF holding anyway in other accounts.
Thank you for that wiki. Yes, I am still in my working years, the perfect 35-44 demo.

VTI would likely do better in the long run but either will do OK. Not seeing the advantage of SCHG. Likely advantage of AVUV or VBR instead.

Markets are up everywhere... except for the meme stock holders. My VTI is up 1.5% today.

Why not just merge the VTI and SCHG into into a single VOO (or SPYM) at 75% and VXUS at 25%?

People see security in the funds that have higher AUM. For some it’s just name recognition of the popular funds makes them seem favorable. Funds like SCHX and SCHB from Schwab for example have a lot lower AUM and therefore less liquidity.
However, for long term investors this is not likely to ever matter. So I’m not sure. If you’re day trading or options trading, VOO, VTI, ITOT, SPY etc would be the funds to use but for buy and hold folks it really doesn’t matter.

Hey thanks for responding!!
High risk tolerance but hoping to retire I. 4 years.
I’m not super savvy with picking, hence my VTI choice - anything you or someone could recommend that is similar with a. Lower expense ratio ?

I've been retired for several years. Had VTSAX, and then VTI pretty much since its inception. Never sold any and kept investing on a consistent basis, including downturns like 2008-2009 when I was down almost 40%. Still holding majority of my portfolio in VTI, but I can afford the risk due to my pension (and my wife's pension as well).
Set a plan and stick to it. Avoid the noise and keep investing on a consistent basis. As you approach retirement, adjust your plan to lessen the impact that a major downturn might have. I agree that a downturn that results in your portfolio balance decreasing by $20K at your age isn't the end of the world. I was down 10 times that in 2009. Given time, it will come back...just don't panic and sell when things look dire.
They are a little dated, but these are links I provide to anyone who asks advice on investing:
[Bob, The World's Worst Market Timer](https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2014/02/worlds-worst-market-timer/)
[The Crazy Power of Compounding](https://sweeneymichel.com/blog/compounding)
I wish you great success in your investing journey!

Relying solely on aggregate bonds like BND is no longer the default for many investors, as 2022 proved that stocks and bonds can drop together during slow, inflation-driven drawdowns. Some say the 60/40 portfolio, where one holds 60% equity and 40% bonds is dead. Instead, one could frame a portfolio around a global equity engine while using specific diversifiers tailored for different types of market environments. For the growth side, one could hold a broad global foundation using VTI and VXUS, while tilting towards Value (AVUV, AVDV) and Momentum (SPMO, IMOM). Because these two factors historically have low correlation, combining them helps smooth out the volatility on the equity side before fixed income is even factored in.
For actual downside protection, diversifiers can be split to handle both "fast crashes" and "slow grinds." To defend against sudden panics, intermediate-term Treasuries (VGIT) or tail-risk hedges (CAOS) often perform much better than corporate-heavy bond funds due to the immediate flight-to-quality effect. To protect against slow, inflationary grinds, one could look entirely outside of fixed income and use alternative assets that thrive when bonds fail, specifically managed futures (DBMF, KMLM) and broad commodities (RAAX, GLD). Bonds still have their place but pairing them with trend-following strategies and real assets creates a much more resilient, all-weather portfolio.

If the money wont be for an immediate use for you or your family (when you pass). I think you should go long VTI or VOO and try to get maximum gains over a long term.
I don't know the age of the family your leaving it for but say you are leaving it for a 30 year old niece or something along those lines. I think you should be aggressive with the money.
Best case would be to make a trust with an aggressive portfolio and when that 30 yr old takes control of the money it more than likely will be a bigger lump of money than if you put it into bonds.