On the Timing, Valuation, and Emotional Discipline Required to Build a Responsible Nothing Portfolio
Pennick Grosz addresses a 30% Nothing allocation, the '09 Void Crash, and why you should ask your advisor what percentage of his own retirement is in Nothi
By Pennick Grosz·June 30, 2026
The office of Pennick Grosz, CFP, CFA, CNC. The Heritage-grade Nothing specimen in the display case is valued at approximately 12,000 sovereigns at current market rates.
Dear Mr. Grosz,
My financial advisor, Bercelot Kine at Kine & Verge Wealth Partners in Threllside, has recommended that I put 30% of my retirement portfolio into Nothing futures. He says the market is "historically undervalued" and that this is "a generational buying opportunity."
I am 54 years old. I have a modest pension, a paid-off home in Ridgewell County, and approximately 190,000 sovereigns in mixed assets. Most of my portfolio is in dehydrated beverage index funds and a small position in inflatable consumer structures. I have never traded Nothing before.
My wife, Tasslyn, thinks the entire Nothing market is speculative nonsense. She says you cannot build a retirement on the absence of something. She grew up in Drosswick, where her father lost a considerable sum during the '09 Void Crash, and she has not trusted the sector since.
Bercelot says the fundamentals have changed since then. He says new purity grading standards from O.O.P.S. have made the market more transparent, and that Heritage-grade Nothing is trading at a P/E ratio that "simply does not reflect the underlying emptiness."
I want to trust him. But I also want to retire at 68 and not spend my final years explaining to Tasslyn why our savings evaporated into, well, Nothing.
Is this a good time to buy Nothing?
-- Cautiously Vacant in Ridgewell County
Dear Cautiously Vacant,
I will be direct with you, because your advisor apparently was not.
Bercelot Kine is not wrong about the fundamentals. The Nothing market has undergone a genuine structural correction since the '09 Void Crash, when unregulated dealers flooded the exchange with sub-grade product and the entire sector collapsed under the weight of what it did not contain. The O.O.P.S. Purity Certification Act of 2014 was, despite that agency's general institutional sluggishness, one of the more consequential pieces of commodity regulation in the last two decades. Heritage-grade Nothing, certified at 99.99% purity or above, now trades on a standardized exchange with transparent grading. This is not the speculative wilderness your wife's father navigated. I do not dismiss her caution, but I would ask her to revisit the data.
That said, I have concerns about Bercelot's allocation recommendation. Thirty percent of a retirement portfolio in a single commodity class, for a client fourteen years from retirement, is aggressive by any reasonable measure. Nothing is a legitimate asset. It is not a growth engine. The five-year annualized return on Heritage-grade futures is 4.2%, which is respectable for a store of value but will not outperform a diversified index over your time horizon. It trades on scarcity, purity differentials, and the philosophical conviction that absence has intrinsic worth. These are defensible fundamentals, but they are not the kind of fundamentals that should represent nearly a third of your nest egg.
My recommendation: a 10% to 12% allocation in Heritage-grade Nothing futures, with a strict purity floor of 99.97%. Do not touch Industrial-grade. Do not touch anything marketed as "Artisanal Void" regardless of what the label says about terroir. Pair the position with your existing dehydrated beverage index holdings (which, I should note, have their own concentration risk; we will discuss the Dehydration Sector in a future column, and you will want to be seated). Round out the portfolio with municipal containment bonds and, if you can tolerate modest volatility, a small position in atmospheric pharmacy equities. This gives you Nothing exposure without making Nothing the centerpiece.
As for Tasslyn: she is right that you cannot build a retirement on the absence of something. But you can hedge one with it. Nothing, properly allocated, functions as a low-correlation stabilizer in a diversified portfolio. It does not move with the dehydrated beverage index. It does not move with inflatable consumer structures. In a market downturn, Nothing holds its value precisely because there is nothing there to lose. This is not a joke. This is portfolio theory.
Tell Bercelot to revise the allocation. If he resists, ask him what percentage of his own retirement is in Nothing. In my experience, advisors who recommend 30% are holding closer to 8%.
Yours in risk-adjusted confidence,
Pennick Grosz, CFP, CFA, CNC
P.S. Regarding the CNC designation after my name: it stands for Certified Nothing Consultant, awarded by the Threllside Correspondence Institute of Commodity Sciences. It is a fully accredited credential. The fact that the final exam was open-book, self-timed, and administered by mail does not diminish its rigor, and I would appreciate it if readers stopped writing in to ask.
