Aug 12, 2016

Weekend Links

QUOTE OF THE DAY

The brave choice is always family.  


CHART OF THE DAY 




RETIREMENT FINANCE AND PLANNING

Don’t Forget Inflation in Your Retirement Plan, RetireBy40.com  I guess I haven’t been there in a while because now the lunch special cost $7.  


Providing Better Retirement Statements, Joe Tomlinson.  Advisors can help overcome the shortcomings; clients need more frequent reporting that goes beyond asset-value statements and shows what their income in retirement will be. I’ll propose the improvements that are needed.  


The Crisis in Retirement Planning, Robert Merton.  Clearly, the risk and return variables that now drive investment decisions are not being measured in units that correspond to savers’ retirement goals and their likelihood of meeting them. Thus, it cannot be said that savers’ funds are being well managed.  





What Is The 'Retirement Spending Smile'? Pfau at Forbes commenting on Blanchett.  On average, this household can expect to experience declining real expenditures through age eighty-four, when real spending reaches a trough of $74,146. This reflects a nearly 26% drop in real expenditures.  After this point, average real expenditures increase, though they do not necessarily exceed their initial retirement levels until retirees reach their mid-nineties.  
Mentioned in this article [previously linked here] Exploring the Retirement Consumption Puzzle, David Blanchett 2014 


MARKETS AND INVESTING

Trading changes how brain processes selling decisions [endowment effect], Uchicago.edu.  Researchers found that while selling, experienced traders had reduced activity in an area of the brain often associated with pain and negative emotions. A separate experiment showed a similar reduction in brain activity after people previously inexperienced in trading were given incentives to trade objects on eBay for two months. The results suggest such experience reduces the emotional pain tied to selling objects, mitigating the role the endowment effect plays in economic decision-making. 


Negative Interest Rates Will End — Badly. CFA Institute. Negative interest rates are unsustainable and once investors decide to stop paying for the privilege of holding government debt, a banking crisis could result, says James Grant.  




Can Successful Trading Be Taught?, traderfeed.  What is clear from my observations and experience is that patterns that have a positive edge in trading can be identified and taught.  What is also clear is that learning those patterns doesn't become successful trading until those patterns are truly internalized.  The many hours of study and performance review serve one important purpose:  taking a pattern that is "out there" and becoming so familiar with it that you learn to feel it internally.  



ALTERNATIVE RISK


Finding 7.5% Returns, NewFound.  In a world where forward returns look to be depressed, but investor expectations remain high, a more dynamic and flexible approach to asset allocation may be one of the only options.  


Seeking Alternatives, irrelevantInvestor.com  


SOCIETY AND CAPITAL

This startup uses machine learning and satellite imagery topredict crop yields, theverge.com   Artificial intelligence + nanosatellites + corn  

Rising Sea Levels Could Cost U.S.Homeowners Close to $1 Trillion, Bloomberg.  Being underwater will soon mean exactly what it says. Especially in Florida.  

IsraelProves the Desalination Era Is Here, Scientific American.  One of the driest countries on Earth now makes more freshwater than it needs  

Why Renewable Power Can Still Be Wasteful, slate.com  Because we’ve incentivized its production—but not the infrastructure to transport it.  

How Helicopter Parenting Can Cause Binge Drinking, theatlantic.com.  The way some white professionals raise their children is exacerbating an alcohol problem on U.S. college campuses.  



The Psychology and Neuroscience of Financial DecisionMaking. Cell.com  One area where this newer data combined with principles from cognitive science can contribute to behavioral finance is by determining how a very long list of behavioral effects can be explained by a small number of principles. As we have described throughout, there is a large number of trading patterns that are inconsistent with the rational use of information and the ideal balance of risk and return…We speculate that many of these seemingly  distinct biases could be generated by a common neural and psychological mechanism. Some emerging evidence for this conjecture has already been found, as the same brain areas encode signals that generate the disposition effect and repurchase effect [92]. This
neural overlap fits with a strong correlation between these effects at the behavioral level. 

Teaching the Unemployment Rate, and Its Limitations, AIER.  

A world without cash, John Cochrane.  The anonymity of cash makes it enduringly popular  


Higher Local Minimum Wages: Early Results from Seattle, ConversableEconomist.  the early evidence from Seattle is that a higher minimum wage at the city level doesn't raise total earnings by much, because low-skilled workers end up with fewer hours on the job.  

The Gender Gap That No One’s Talking About, Medium.com  Women are lagging significantly behind men when it comes to financial knowledge and security, increasing their chances of falling into poverty.  

A secret for cutting spending. NYT.  Hint: a waiting period.    

Is Support for Democracy Eroding? Timothy Taylor.  the share of people saying that a democratic political system is a bad or a very bad way to run the country has risen since the mid-1990s, and this attitude is also more prevalent among younger adults. In the US, the support for a "strong leader" who doesn't have to "bother with parliament and elections" has especially risen among those with higher income levels. 

The Gender Diversity Dividend  CFA Institute.  




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