Your humble advisor was quoted in last month's issue of Kiplingers Personal Finance. (click here to read the entire article - my commentary is toward the end - slide 14).
The article was titled "13 ways to simplify your finances". Great tips in the article overall. My commentary involved the issue of investment portfolio complexity. Over the years I have seen some incredibly complicated portfolios, people holding hundreds of stocks, ETF's and mutual funds. I am not sure what such complexity is intended to accomplish. Does it help the investor diversify? Not really. You can adequately diversify a portfolio using less than 10 funds. In fact, to go really simple, some investors may do fine with a one stop fund like a target date fund. So the complexity does little or nothing to reduce portfolio risk. So will holding more funds increase your returns? Not likely. The more stocks you hold, the more your portfolio starts to look like the overall market - which you could have invested in with a single fund.
We rarely hold more than a dozen positions in our managed portfolios. This is typically all that is required to gain all the diversification you need, with exposure to all important investment asset classes. Keep It Simple Stupid!