My friend David C says I sandbag on this blog way too much. Otoh, it is sometimes warranted. So, here is the real-deal as I wind down my blog:
- I do not have a background in statistics or probability
- I do not have a background in math or econ
- I do have a BA in Religion! OMG! (get the joke?)
- I do have an MBA in finance from '88 but I consider that almost worthless. What did I learn? Some NPV analysis and a few marketing mantras? Heh. What the hell did I spend on that degree anyway?
- I did do a self-study in calc/diff-eq, retirement finance, stats, probability, linear algebra, coding and data science, macro econ, continuous time finance, financial modeling, decisions under uncertainty, optimal control theory, game theory, actuarial science, etc etc etc for maybe about 4 years and those 4 years were within what we can still call reasonably recent memory...but it was entirely as a subject-focused autodidact so there are obviously some really big holes. Whatever...
- I have run out a whole bunch of retirement finance dreck here on this blog -- a lot of it -- which depends, of course, quite a bit, on the previous bullet point. But then again I have taken all of this as far as I really want to take it...see below...
Do I know what I'm doing? No idea. Maybe. Probably. Pretty sure. Yes. So there! My sandbagging is out of the way. If you want more cred than that, read ERN or SSRN.
Also, I have to say that I am, as I hinted in the last bullet above, pretty much done with this whole blog thing. Why am I "done?"
- I answered most, if not all, of the questions I wanted answers to, and they were all for my own reasons. I have blogged on the "why I started this thing" before. I can do it again if anyone is interested. Actually, it's a pretty good story,
- I got both bored and/or tired of the subject. It is hard, complex and in the end there are really no perfect answers. That last point has been weighing on my for a couple years. I mean, why bother?
- I can't monetize my 3 readers. Heh ;-) Paypal me if you must! David, send money,
- I am trying to focus on other goals like moving north again, art and literature, and philosophy. I am doing what I call south-to-north, left-brain to right, middle aged to late-middle-aged. Act II to Act III of IV. blah blah blah...
- I have way more confidence in seat-of-the-pants or generalized answers or methods. I kinda know stuff now, the stuff that old folks have intuited for centuries[3]. I can see the flow of things (my original goal) better. I used to poll old folks (my age now, ha!) and they always laughed at me: "why so much math? it's really simple. Why do you over-complicate?" It really is simple if you don't work for a university or a brokerage.
- I busted through enough amateur boundaries for one decade. I've done what, in my humble estimation (maybe cocky, idk), few amateurs have done. Most of the others in this zone are academics, advanced pros, and PhDs in econ. Idk, how much farther can I go as me? The incentives are a little whack, if you know what I mean.
So, now what? Another post? Sure, why not.
I was just at my girlfriend's (strange to call a 66yo grandmother a "gf" but whatever) house and she was like "what are you thinking about?" as I was staring into my coffee a couple mornings ago. Me: "Uh, idk, maybe how lucky you are??" ...cold stare... "no, actually, really, I was thinking about what if I did a Perfect Withdrawal Rate but then added both random lifetime [a past innovation by me btw] AND a fat tailed return distribution [again, new by me]." She, of course, being both a kind person and a classical pianist (with a broken hand, fwiw) looked at me like I had two, no three, no four, heads. I mean, who thinks up these ret-fin things. I guess me, Moshe and David. Maybe a couple others.
Now that I think of it, I once coaxed a famous professor of ret-fin to admit that even his wife shakes her head at this stuff. Now that was funny. Those bylines in research papers are real people, fwiw. I never knew that. I thought they were all robots printing stuff from the cached memory of their AI. Teasing. Most of the men and women to whom I have reached out have been very very generous with both their time and thoughts. And they all really do think about this stuff. Crazy, right?
But then again, all of these types of questions have taken me through almost a decade of blogging. Do I really need to know the answer to all of my weird questions? No, not really, but once posed, I kinda want to see what they look like. This has been the impetus for almost a decade, so here we are...