Aug 7, 2018

Case for social cooperation among retirees with high vol strategies?

If:

(1) the long-horizon time-averaged geometric return for an individual investor with volatile returns is said to be something like E(g) = µ - σ2/2 (see any finance textbook; long horizon is technically infinity I think but maybe less in practice), and 

(2) the presence of consumption over "multiple periods" in retirement (in the presence of volatile returns) creates the potential for sequence risk above and beyond (or due to?) the drift term and thus the potential for whatever you want to call it: higher ruin risk and/or lower consumption utility due to higher incidence of wealth depletion, etc., and

(3) the mathematics of cooperation for “N cooperators” implies that the “spurious drift term is [- σ2/2N] so that the time-average growth approaches expectation-value growth for large N” [1]

Then: 


Doesn’t that imply that there is a case for N retirees to cooperate (and I mean not via a “tax and reallocate” scheme [1])? Like this: Maybe 1000 retirees, perhaps via some peer-to-peer social network (I didn’t want to say app) with some as-yet unknown guarantor/enforcer, could combine via a joint swap agreement (and let’s ignore the obvious tax issues for now) to pool their return experiences. Swap, I guess, because a pooled-fund would be invested in the same asset/s and the drift term would revert since there would be no super high and super low outcomes of wealth to “pool” over some set of periods. Swap would mean high returns, mitigated vol effects: a retiree dream. Even two people would be enough to make it interesting to think about since the drift term would be divided by 4 rather than 2. That’d be motive to take on risk too. Maybe this is perpetual motion or anti-gravity type thinking. I’ll have to ponder this some more.

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[1] Ergodicityeconomics.com, Lecture notes, Chapter 4 p 91. …and, while we’re at it…let’s all just please (please!) ignore the annoying comments about and implications for wealth taxation, especially for retirees that have saved over an entire lifetime in order to not be a hassle to themselves, their children, or society at large, having been already taxed on pretty much everything else including what created the wealth in the first place along the way.




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