We consider the dynamics of a cosmological substratum of pressureless matter and holographic dark energy with a cutoff length proportional to the Ricci scale. Stability requirements for the matter perturbations are shown to single out a model with a
fixed relation between the present matter fraction $Omega_{m0}$ and the present value $omega_{0}$ of the equation-of-state parameter of the dark energy. This model has the same number of free parameters as the $Lambda$CDM model but it has no $Lambda$CDM limit. We discuss the consistency between background observations and the mentioned stability-guaranteeing parameter combination.
