What the Dare slot does
The Dare slot is where investors put a single bet they genuinely care about — never more than 10% of their portfolio, because that's the rule. One fund, not a basket of speculative positions. The investor picks it themselves, which is the whole point: conviction matters when you're putting money at risk. This isn't about diversification. It's about having a designated space for the bets investors actually believe in but shouldn't be making with their core portfolio.
The psychological function of Dare is real and worth understanding. Without this slot, high-risk positions contaminate the other four — they leak into Park (cash you think will appreciate), they outsize themselves in Grow (leveraging your VOO position instead of allocating it properly), or they get abandoned when volatility hits because no framework exists for them. Dare legitimizes the bet and limits it, so investors can make their conviction explicit without destabilizing everything else.
Your Dare: pick one
Unlike the other four slots, Dare has no Richiest pick. The investor chooses their own fund because conviction is the point — you can't have genuine conviction in a position recommended by someone else's framework. Here are four options that different types of investors pick:
How much Dare belongs in your Frame
The Dare allocation is the last item to change as investors age — not because it's unimportant, but because it serves a different function at every life stage. In your 20s and 30s, 10% makes sense: you have time to recover from losses, and asymmetric upside has real optionality value. By your 50s, the allocation should shrink to 5% — not because you've become more conservative, but because a loss that would have been survivable at 32 is genuinely consequential at 55.
| Life stage | Park | Earn | Build | Roam | Dare |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20s | 5% | 10% | 55% | 20% | 10% |
| 30s | 10% | 15% | 45% | 20% | 10% |
| 40s | 10% | 25% | 35% | 20% | 10% |
| 50s | 15% | 30% | 30% | 20% | 5% |
| 60s+ | 20% | 40% | 20% | 15% | 5% |
Starting points. Adjust to your income stability, risk tolerance, and actual liquidity needs.
What Dare is not
The Dare slot is not a basket of small speculative bets. Investors who want to "be creative" with their Dare allocation sometimes pile it into five different meme-adjacent positions — crypto micro-caps, penny stocks, options, whatever seems most exciting that week. This defeats the purpose entirely. The rule is one fund. One bet. If you have four ideas, pick the strongest and put 10% behind it. The rest are outside the Frame.
Dare is also not a substitute for understanding what you own. Buying TQQQ because "the tech sector is going up" without reading how 3x leverage works daily resets is not conviction — it's ignorance dressed as courage. The same applies to IBIT (understanding Bitcoin's risks), SMH (recognizing sector concentration risk), and BOTZ (knowing that thematic ETFs can underperform for years). Dare demands more honesty, not less.
Full broker comparison: Best broker for ETF investing →