Apr 29, 2016

Volatility Risk Premium - an Amateur's Foray

Here is a post I did a while back on the volatility risk premium on LinkedIn Pulse (Volatility Risk Premium - An Amateur's One Year Foray Into an Alternative Risk Capture Experiment) .  I do less of this than I did at the time of the post but I do continue to dabble.  I view volatility as a credible alternative risk premium that can be accretive to one's efficient frontier.

Weekend Links on Retirement Finance, Markets, and Alt Risk

Apr 26, 2016

Wade Pfau on Modern Retirement Theory at Forbes

A recent article by Wade Pfau in Forbes covering the work of Jason Branning and M. Ray Grubbs (Modern Retirement Theory) treads little new ground in retirement finance yet I found much of the article worth highlighting here.  These are important points that often get overshadowed when we discuss things like asset allocation, safe withdrawal rates, Social Security deferral, etc. 

Retirement "Big Picture" in One Diagram


Apr 24, 2016

Annually Recalculated Virtual Annuity: A Test Drive

I thought I'd try my hand at the Waring and Siegel Annually Recalculated Virtual Annuity (ARVA) (The Only Spending Rule Article You Will Ever Need M. Barton Waring and Laurence B. Siegel, 2015) as an alternative to other retirement spending models to see how it works.

Can a Retail Investor Capture "Systematic Alternative Risk Premia" Without Institutional Help?

"Systematic alternative risk," depending on how you look at it, goes by quite a few names these days and from what I can tell it appears to be a very current thing -- if not perhaps overly current -- in institutional finance circles.  Other names for this phenomenon can include (broadly speaking now): dynamic beta, hedge fund beta, exotic beta, smart beta, "tilts" of various flavors (e.g., value, size, and maybe especially momentum), etc. etc.  There may or may not be important differences among these names, of course, especially with respect to "smart beta,"