Weekend Links - Jan 27 17

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“One thing I’ve learned is that in the investment business when you hear the word ‘never,’ it’s about to happen.” – Jeffrey Gundlach

CHART OF THE DAY

Incarceration rates/100k 1978-2015

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RETIREMENT FINANCE AND PLANNING

Applying a Systematic Investment Process to DistributivePortfolios - A 150 Year Study Demonstrating Enhanced Outcomes Through Trend Following, Blueprint Investment Partners.  …we seek to analyze the effects on the sustainability of various initial distribution rates when applying a systematic risk management strategy to traditionally constructed portfolios. The systematic risk management strategy examined in this paper will be referred to as trend following…Our findings indicate that portfolios with trend following tend to survive more frequently and last longer during failures than similarly allocated buy and hold portfolios. 

3 Ways To Incorporate Bonds Into Your Retirement Strategy, Pfau. The discussion builds toward an eventual consideration of time segmentation—a hybrid strategy that invests differently for short-term and long-term expenses rather than use a total-returns approach. Time segmentation is often described as a way to help manage sequence of returns risk, though this point is controversial.  and Do You Understand How Bonds Work?

Do Americans Really Save Too Little and Should We Nudge Themto Save More? The Ethics of Nudging Retirement Savings, Zywicki.  …once it is recognized that there is an opportunity cost to saving more—one must consume less today, borrow more, or work more—the theoretical validity of the claim that people undersave because of behavioral biases is suspect. Given the inherently subjective nature of opportunity cost, a central planner cannot be confident that he can make people better off by influencing their consumption expenditures across time than he could by shifting consumption expenditures across different goods and services today. It is concluded that there is little reason to believe that people would be made better off by nudging them to save more for retirement.  

Saving Retirement, Jeffrey Saut.  The point is, there is a very good chance that retirees will require income for longer than they anticipate, and the average person is woefully unprepared.  

The Many Uncertainties Involved With Retirement Planning, Ben Carlson.  You make your assumptions. You set your plan. You try to account for as many variables as you can. But then you let go of all of those factors that are completely out of your control. You update your priors as new information comes to light. Eventually, real world results replace your assumptions and you get a better sense of how well reality fits within your initial plans.  [comment: not bad for a young not-retired guy]

How much can I spend in retirement? Our Take on the 4% Rule. Cordant.  The first priority of retirement planning is to ensure one doesn’t outlive their assets. Early retirement age combined with good health and improved medicine is the perfect recipe for outlasting your assets without proper planning. For those retirees that hang ‘em up well before 65, using the 30-year assumption could cause them to drastically undershoot their realistic life expectancies, causing major financial pain in later years. 

The Biggest Mistake Older Investors are Making Right Now, Cordant.  

Millennials may need to double how much they save forretirement, WP and Stanford center on Longevity. 

Treatment of Inflation in Retirement Planning Calculations:An Improved Method, Journal of Fin Planning.  In calculating the capital needs for retirement, inflation-adjusted rates of return for each step should be chosen based on portfolio choices appropriate for before and after retirement. 

On Hacking Out a (Really) Rough Asset Allocation Optimizer by Using Backward Induction and Dynamic Stochastic Programming, by me.  This was my attempt at creating a home brew version of what Gordan Irlam did at AAcalc.com and described in an article in the Journal of Personal Finance.  Just to see if I could do it.  Not sure if I was successful or if I will find it immediately useful but the process was worth the effort for other reasons.   

MARKETS AND INVESTING 

 The Mythology of Rebalancing: A Random Walk down Performanceand Risk Management, AlphaEngine Global Investment Solutions …we will just focus on the robo-advisors and argue that one key activity underlying these platforms and even practiced very broadly in institutional investing and defined contribution funds, naïve rebalancing, is predicated on bad theory and myths and fails the key test of whether it truly improves performance and/or risk management. We will demonstrate that many previous studies of rebalancing examine this issue from a simplistic perspective of a two-asset portfolio and a simple measure of risk, volatility. When we examine these strategies from the perspective of a multi-asset portfolio and a broader set of risk statistics (that a sophisticated investor would apply), then these naïve rebalancing strategies are nothing more than a form of poor market timing and the performance is a coin-toss and the risk profile of the portfolio is typically worsened.  

New Research on Forecasting Returns with the CAPE Ratio. Georg Vrba.  Thus, the most likely forward 10-year real annualized return would be about 5.5% [hmmm]  

Managing Active Risk. Newfound.  We believe that understanding, monitoring, and adjusting for risk budget limits in absolute level, relative composition, and tracking error is critical for constructing a portfolio that investors can stick with over the long run. 

ALTERNATIVE RISK

How Not to Get Fired with Smart Beta Investing, Research Affiliates. Agents often have an incentive to choose portfolio allocations designed to minimize their risk of being fired at an all-too-common three-year evaluation horizon, over which both robust strategies and “the best” managers can experience prolonged bouts of underperformance. 

SOCIETY AND CAPITAL

Hyperinflation When prices go out of control, FRED blog 

The Oxfam Report is Important, But There’s More to the Story, visualcapitalist.com. Oxfam and many others are rightly concerned about inequality. But, for the people that need it most, things continue to get better. Such a narrative is not sexy enough for a click-driven media that thrives on sensational or emotional soundbites.