Jul 27, 2017

Weekend Links - 7/27/2017

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

[patience is] a subversive act. On the other side of impatience – if you can learn to wait out that jitteriness – lies power. OliverBurkeman 



RETIREMENT FINANCE AND PLANNING

[I thought this was a really good synoptic cover of the universe of literature on retirement drawdown, self-managed strategies, and the annuitization paradox. By 5 PhDs from the society of actuaries but very readable. ] 

we believe selection of an appropriate discount rate is critical for many personal financial decisions.  

The fundamental nature of risk for retirees is the threat that poor market returns will permanently lower their standard of living. Retirees must decide how much risk to their lifestyle they are willing to accept. Spending more today based on assumed future earnings is risky business. It may be reasonable behavior for the more risk tolerant among us, but most people aren’t comfortable with it. The consequences must be considered in advance. 


Dependent risk analysis is a staple of many fields from nuclear power plant design to insurance to aerospace engineering but it appears to be rarely referenced in retirement literature. A Google search of "dependent risk and retirement" turned up a single reference including both terms and it's from the field of political science research[7] referring to retiring from an election. Dr. Thorne's analysis of elder bankruptcy data tells us that retirees should also be should be concerned about it.  …  This also raises the issue of how we can best deploy our retirement assets to mitigate retirement risk. It appears that our goal should be to first avoid the worst case, a chain reaction leading to ruin. A chain reaction will likely have far worse outcomes than any individual risk. 


MARKETS AND INVESTING

Rather than looking for the optimal portfolio, finding a robust portfolio that is close to optimal may be a better long-run investment.  [he doesn't say it but this is either the same or a close relative of resampling frontiers as laid out by R Michaud. Either way, he is correct] 

Plausibility and empirical evidence suggest that the market portfolio is not efficient. 



ALTERNATIVE RISK

The proper comparison/benchmark for these strategies is to look at a passively rebalanced asset mix that is invested equal to the average exposure of the momentum or trend-following strategy… Results show that while momentum and trend-following strategies outperform their benchmarks, they do not -contrary to popular wisdom- reduce volatility. However, most importantly they do significantly reduce the most important investor measure which is downside risk or maximum drawdowns. Careful analysis shows that these strategies exhibit an asymmetric returns profile:  historically they have actually underperformed their benchmarks in bull markets but more than make up for this by significantly outperforming in bear markets.  A true understanding of the nature of these strategies is necessary as an investor or as an advisor in order to know what you can expect going forward. 

Price history will show that KMI and the MLP sector endured a terrible operating environment during the 2015 crash in crude oil. Most investors even today regard the worst bear market in the sector’s history (see The 2015 MLP Crash; Why and What’s Next) as an oil-induced fall in operating results. The reality for KMI was that growth plans driven by the Shale Revolution exceeded the financing capacity of a specialized investor base. This is pretty much the case for midstream in general. It’s not obvious from a price chart, but if you followed developments real time it’s the real story. 

There are economies of scale for managing a hedge fund business as a firm grows, but there are potential diseconomies of scale associated with the investment management of the business. You may get firms to be much more competitive on price as the assets under management grow or as it prices a large new inflow, but there may also be higher investment costs with running the money. One way to combat this higher liquidity cost is to increase expenditure and resources on trading and execution algorithms. [this indirectly makes my point that small scale individual investors have an edge when it comes to trading semi-liquid instruments]  

Demand for lower fees and customization is pushing the small cadre of institutional systematic trend-followers to offer more affordable versions of their flagship strategies. 


The beta battle of what portion of returns can be explained by systematic factors continues across the asset management world. However, it is not so much a battle of performance breakdown between beta and alpha skill but of definition. What used to be called alpha in a simple one-factor world can now be partially described as a beta. The alpha manager of yesterday is partially the alternative or smart beta manager of today not by design but from construction. The incredible shrinking alpha is associated with the incredible growing betas. 


SOCIETY AND CAPITAL


an increasing body of research and criticism suggests that algorithms and artificial intelligence aren’t necessarily a panacea for ending prejudice, and they can have disproportionate impacts on groups that are already socially disadvantaged, particularly people of color. Instead of offering a workaround for human biases, the tools we designed to help us predict the future may be dooming us to repeat the past by replicating and even amplifying societal inequalities that already exist.  

A Four Thousand Year Old Bond, marginalrevolution  

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