don't put all your eggs in one basket

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

one of the oldest and most universal financial idioms, advising against concentrating all of one's resources, hopes, or investments in a single venture or opportunity, on the grounds that if that single venture fails the entire resource is lost; the metaphor invokes the obvious practical wisdom of transporting eggs — a fragile commodity — in multiple baskets so that a single accident destroys only a portion of the total; the principle is the foundation of investment portfolio diversification, the strategy of spreading investments across different assets, sectors, geographies, and risk levels so that any single failure affects only part of the portfolio; the idiom is attributed variously to Miguel de Cervantes in Don Quixote (Sancho Panza advises it), to Benjamin Franklin, and to various folk wisdom traditions; modern portfolio theory formalises the principle mathematically, showing that diversification reduces risk without proportionately reducing expected return