Everyone knows that delaying the starting age of social security increases your benefits. Its right there in your social security statement. But most people don’t know how big an impact delaying social security can have when looked at in terms of investment returns. If retirees knew how big an impact Read more
What happened to all the buy and hold bond investors? See table below. The latest long term fund data from ICI shows bond investors are doing what most investors do. Flee an investment at the first signs of distress. Taxable bonds lost about 4% of assets in June and Read more
For today I’d like to get back to one of my favorite topics, Quantitative Investing. I did a series of 7 posts (the last one in the series is here) showing how an investor can implement quantitative strategies on their own with free or low cost available tools. But this Read more
I’ve been asked the question in the title of this post quite a bit lately – why have the IVY timing portfolios been under performing lately? Here I will show the performance of the various portfolios I track over different investment periods and discuss their recent performance. The table below Read more
Today was the last trading day of the month of July. Time to update the IVY timing portfolio signals. This post updates the signals for the basic IVY 5 asset class timing portfolio, also known as GTAA 5. You can see the signals at world beta or at dshort as well. Starting in this month’s Read more
Sometimes it pays to go back to basics. With retirement planning it’s no different. The common, top down approach with retirement planning starts with total net worth and then uses a safe withdrawal rate (SWR), most commonly 4%, to figure out how much one can spend per year in retirement Read more
Today I’d like to address some of the biggest concerns with the IVY portfolios, in particular the timing versions. Three big concerns with the implementation of IVY are management fees, trading commissions, and taxes and that they may impact performance enough to render any advantage mute. These are truly valid Read more
Now that I’ve presented several variations and updates to the IVY portfolios, in this post I update all the relevant portfolio statistics and compare them to some commonly held diversified portfolios. I provide the definitions of the portfolio stats and the various portfolios. I conclude with some brief observations. In Read more
Today I’ll cover a few other extensions to the IVY timing model beyond those I covered in my last post. The source of these extensions is the same, Mebane Faber’s IVY update outlining these approaches. The extensions I’ll cover are varying the weighting of the asset class mix and taking Read more
In my last post I updated the official numbers for the IVY timing model. The original version of the model consists of a diversified portfolio of 5 asset classes. In the research paper Mebane Faber also looks at several extension to the 5 asset class timing model that improve returns Read more
Mebane Faber, the creator of the IVY timing portfolio, has recently released an official update of the model with returns through the end of 2012. He also did a series of posts on his blog that chops up the update into more digestible pieces. For an intro to this topic Read more