Dec 21, 2017

Weekend Links - 12/21/2017

QUOTE OF THE DAY

...when you’re dealing with uncertainty and complexity, simple ideas are not dumbed-down ideas. They are often complex solutions gift wrapped for you in a way that makes their application practical and sustainable. .  Morgan Housel 


RETIREMENT FINANCE AND PLANNING

Most research on retirement strategies assumes that people have saved adequately. But data on household savings shows that many households fall short, and will need to call on relatives or other sources for support. This raises questions about the best withdrawal or annuity strategies when savings are insufficient. It turns out that which strategy works best is different than for adequately funded retirements. 

We show that partial tontinization of retirement wealth can serve as a reliable supplement to existing pension products. 

Liability-driven investing (LDI)—in particular liability-relative optimization—represents a fundamental improvement over more common asset-only portfolio optimization techniques, such as mean-variance optimization. Almost all portfolios exist to pay for some future form of consumption, so liability-relative optimization is almost always more appropriate than asset-only approaches. By considering liability characteristics when solving for the asset allocation, LDI techniques take advantage of the natural hedging quality of certain investments. 

Why Taxes Matter for Retirement Calculations: The New Law, Darrow Kirkpatrick
But my views have been tempered and refined somewhat. Last year I wrote One Retirement Number You Can’t Afford to Get Wrong about the difficulty of estimating accurate effective tax rates. At this point I would say that, while taxation in retirement is not a primary concern for frugal retirees, there are still situations and reasons when it makes sense to insist on the most accurate possible tax calculations in your retirement planning. Here are some of them: 

Retiring Early Just Might Kill You, Says New Research, Bloomberg
We already know you’re better off financially the later you begin claiming Social Security. Now it seems there’s another reason to hold off on collecting those checks: If you retire early you’re more likely to die early as well. 





MARKETS AND INVESTING

“I think the bond market is on drugs… It’s hard to take the yield curve seriously as a recession indicator.” 

we dub the “Markowitz uncertainty principle” implies that mean-variance efficient portfolios are a practical impossibility, and that attaining “pragmatic diversification” should instead be the goal of investors. We also argue that MPT is silent as to whether any fund manager can or should be able to beat his or her benchmark consistently. We can, however, combine the MPT framework with existing empirical evidence to generate practical advice about active investment for retail investors. For capital budgeting, we argue that the literature implies that the original single-beta capital asset pricing model (CAPM) should typically be implemented using a multi-beta framework. 




ALTERNATIVE RISK

One of the biggest issues with momentum investing is that it requires a high amount of turnover as the best-performing assets tend to change rapidly over any of the standard lookback periods. It’s also true that for any investment strategy to “work” (3) it must go through extended periods of time when it doesn’t. If these premiums always outperformed there would be so much capital invested in them that they would become so crowded that they would lose their advantages. 


SOCIETY AND CAPITAL


The next time a 35 – 60 year old makes you feel bad, give them a pass, including myself. And if you want to really get a happiness boost, find some 70+ year olds to hang out with. They might even teach you a thing or two about living a wonderful life.  

Our lives are not stocks. But expectations matter. The evidence on the U-curve in life satisfaction is overwhelming. If it doesn’t hit you smack dab between the eyes consider yourself lucky. We spend so much time planning our financial lives: saving, working, spending. We do little to plan for life’s inevitable shocks whether they be in middle age or in retirement. Just knowing about the existence of the U-curve will remind you that you are not unique and there is a reason for optimism on the other side. 

As long as subsidies exist, it seems that too much money will be allocated to agriculture loans, and will therefore, keep grain prices lower.  

Nadolnyak, Harrarska, Shen
In this paper, we evaluate the impact of the ENSO anomalies on the performance of agricultural loan portfolios of the Farm Credit System FCS institutions - the largest agricultural lender in this region. We find that, compared to neutral years, the share of delinquent loans in the FCS portfolio decreases by 1.5 to 2 percentage points following La Nina years and increases by 1.5 to 2 percentage points following El Nino years. These delinquencies are generally resolved because the impact on loan write-offs is much smaller, although statistically significant which suggests that the FCS institutions have well-diversified portfolios. The results also suggest that agricultural insurance markets are complementary to credit markets, that land values at loan origination have a positive impact on delinquencies, and that loan write-offs decrease with the lender’s size. 

Jen Brown
Small businesses – especially sole proprietors – are a large portion of the American workforce. With the explosive growth of the on-demand economy – which creates a number of new self-employed, sole proprietors each day – an estimated 2.5 million new small businesses are expected to be created each year. Yet, saving for retirement as a small business owner and especially as a sole proprietor is a challenge, as only 38.7% of small business owners participated in a retirement plan in 2014. 

Tests reveal that institutions have significantly reduced equity ownership of polluters.
Consistent with expectations of increasing environmentalism and climate change awareness,  institutional ownership of polluters is linearly decreasing over the sample period, ceteris paribus…I test the performance of polluters with a long-short portfolio strategy, which fails to provide evidence of abnormal performance of polluter stocks.  

The east and west coasts have lots of high earners; the south east farming belt fell way behind . . . 







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