May 5, 2017

Weekend Links - 5/5/17

QUOTE OF THE DAY

The best traders hold themselves accountable; they hold themselves to the goals they set and they set their goals in measurable ways. BrettSteenbarger 

Markets don't have to go down and stay down to ruin your retirement. All you need is a bear market at the wrong time, and the sustainability of your income can be cut in half. Milevsky  

PICTURE OF THE DAY


RETIREMENT FINANCE AND PLANNING

Spending Down Your Assets in Retirement – Finding the“Goldilocks” Solution, Ken Steiner.   Judiciously utilizing the Actuarial Approach in combination with a more static approach may just provide the necessary adjustments that will enable retirees to find their Goldilocks solution.  

What’s the Most Appropriate Planning Age for Retirees? Pfau.  The relationship between how long you’ll live and your sustainable spending rate is a difficult piece of the retirement planning puzzle. Ultimately, a longer retirement horizon means spending less in order to sustain the available resources.  [following: my chart interpretation of Wade's table]




The Mental Mistakes We Make With Retirement Spending, WSJ.  Too often, the same personality traits that facilitate saving for retirement become impediments when it is time to spend that money. 

Floods And Deserts: Why The Dream Of A Secure Pension For Everyone Is Still Unattained, Stephen C. Sexauer and Laurence B. Siegel.  Nov 2016.  We argue that the current wave of pensions in crisis is due to predictable human behavioral shortcomings, not evildoers or a fundamental flaw in DB pension plans. Specifically, when pension sponsors, employees, and investment managers “anchored” on an extremely rare event, the 18.5% compound annual return that the U.S. stock market enjoyed from 1982 to 1999, they mentally projected these returns forward into the future. Then, they funded the plans accordingly. In their imagining, the markets, not the sponsors and employees, were going to pay for the benefits. 


Retirement Planning Explained Backwards, Dirk Cotton.  This may seem obvious and intuitive but it isn't uncommon to hear someone say that they have decided to fund retirement with annuities, a stock portfolio, or even an increasing stock allocation when they have documented neither their mission nor their objectives. That's a little like deciding to fly American Airlines and then deciding where you want to go and then deciding why you want to go there.  

Confessions of a VA Critic, Moshe Milevsky (2007)  [dated but good cover]


Approximate Solutions to Retirement Spending Problems and the Optimality of Ruin by Faisal Habib, Huang Huaxiong, Moshe A. Milevsky :: SSRN  


MARKETS AND INVESTING 

Why Baby Boomers Won’t Destroy the Stock Market in Retirement, Ben Carlson. Maybe I’m wrong. It’s possible that baby boomers will destroy the stock market as a nice going away present for the next generation. I don’t necessarily buy this argument but anything is possible in the markets. Future returns could be lower with or without selling pressure from this demographic. 

Dynamic Asset Allocation with Horizon Risk: Revisiting Glide Path Construction, JWM.  We compare the empirical distributions of equity and fixed-income returns at different time horizons and find that the risk of equities relative to fixed income is more acute at short time horizons than long time horizons, confirming previous research. This creates the opportunity to develop a dynamic asset allocation process that exploits the reduced horizon risk of equities relative to fixed income. We highlight key data on changing relative risk with time and leverage this information to introduce methods and concepts that inform glide path construction — the building blocks for a dynamic asset allocation process that can support lifecycle, target date retirement, and goals-based investing frameworks.  


ALTERNATIVE RISK

“Alternative” Facts About Formulaic Value Investing,  alpha architect.  A new paper, “Facts about Formulaic Value Investing,” is making the rounds and professes to plunge a dagger directly into the heart of systematic value investors.  

Quants Fire Back at Paul Tudor Jones After His Attack on Risk Parity, Bloomberg. “First you had Leon Cooperman and now it’s a hedge fund guy,” said Qian. “Any time performance isn’t doing well, they just blame risk parity.”  

Balyasny's Tip to Hedge Funds at Crossroads: Imitate Bezos, Bloomberg.  As for hedge funds, they will have to either scale down to focus on niche strategies where they can differentiate themselves or build a diverse business, Chicago-based Balyasny wrote. The alternative, he said, is shutting up shop. 

Factor Investing in Multi-Asset Portfolios, Newfound.  While this description might illuminate the process, it does not explain the why.  Why we perform this process is to align our portfolio as closely as possible with the factors we’ve explored herein: factors we believe have the potential to generate excess risk-adjusted returns and introduce beneficial diversification opportunities into traditionally built portfolios.  

The Capacity Of Smart Beta Funds — Larger Than Previously Thought? AlphaArchitect.com  Clearly there have to be some capacity constraints on “smart beta” strategies, but the real question is how much capacity? A newer paper by Ronald Ratcliffe, Paolo Miranda, and Andrew Ang titled “Capacity of Smart Beta Strategies: A Transaction Cost Perspective” examines this issue. It should be noted that the authors work for Blackrock, and similar to the AQR crew, these authors find that the capacity of smart beta is larger than most academic model-based estimated trading costs. 

Scenarios for Momentum Investing Sharpereturns.ca.  In this post, let's run various scenarios to see how us momentum investors would fare in each of them.  

Factor Investing – Tilting at Windmills. Cullen Roche.  I should add a caveat here. I am not against active deviations from market cap weighting. What I am against is high fee deviations from market cap weighting. If you can diversify in reasonably priced factor funds I am not necessarily against that. The real problem here is the high fee factor funds that purport to generate alpha in exchange for those high fees. 

Swedroe Spotlight: Enhancing Momentum Strategies Via Idiosyncratic Momentum. AlphaArchitect.  "David Blitz, Hanauer, and Vidojevic make a strong case for using iMOM instead of the conventional total return momentum. It produces only slightly lower returns, but greatly reduces the crash risk and results in an almost doubling of the Sharpe ratio. Note that their firm, Robeco Asset Management, uses iMOM in its strategies, and AQR Capital Management also uses idiosyncratic momentum as part of its overall momentum strategies." 



SOCIETY AND CAPITAL

Cash is king no more, NYT.  In a country as consumed with money as ours is, it is only natural that money itself should become a collector's item. 

Point of No Return: Two Factors Shaping Women and Investing, CFA Institute.  The narrative around women and money is now one of success. 

Bitcoin and the Disintermediation of the State, AIER. Whereas universities have long taught that money can only be provided by a government that guarantees it and demands its use in taxation, Bitcoin has thrived for eight years without any government backing it, tantalizingly offering a glimpse of a future separation between state and money, starving government of the fuel that powers its totalitarian impulses and warlike tendencies. 

Growing Gaps in College-Attainment Rates, Fed Resv of St. Louis.  This post is the first of a two-part series on the role that higher education may play in increasing racial and ethnic disparities in income and wealth. Today’s post examines the attainment rates of college education among different demographic groups. 


Adam Smith on Beggar Thy Neighbor, Tim Taylor.  "[N]ations have been taught that their interest consisted in beggaring all their neighbours. Each nation has been made to look with an invidious eye upon the prosperity of all the nations with which it trades, and to consider their gain as its own loss. Commerce, which ought naturally to be, among nations, as among individuals, a bond of union and friendship, has become the most fertile source of discord and animosity." 



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