One of the challenges in dealing with modern portfolios like the Permanent Portfolio, the various IVY portfolios, Risk Parity portfolios, etc is the lack of long term historical data. Most of the modern portfolio data for a broad range of asset classes only goes back to 1973. The period from Read more…
In today’s post I want to address another approach to dealing with the prospect of poor future returns. In my last post I described the prospect of poor future returns and different risk-based portfolio strategies in such an environment. Today I’ll consider an alternative. The alternatives are various dedicated income Read more…
There’s been a lot of chatter recently about asset valuations, in particular US stocks and US bonds, and their impact of future returns. This is nothing new. It just seems to get louder at the start of every new year. I’ve discussed this topic before on the blog. Last time Read more…
Time for another one of those yearly updates. In this post I’ll update the data for the worst times in history to retire by adding 2014 data to the 4 worst retirement portfolios in history. See here for last year’s update. The worst time to retire since 1929 turns out Read more…
This post has nothing to do with asset prices, valuation, or timing the market as the title may have led you to believe. It has to do with investor psychology and behavior. Over the years I’ve wondered if certain types of people would be happier if they didn’t invest in anything Read more…
Today I wanted to talk about the forecasting of future returns and more importantly what implications future returns have for SWRs (Safe Withdrawal Rates). As I showed in my last post, the first 10 year period real return in retirement is the best predictor of SWRs for 30 year retirement Read more…
The starting year of retirement makes a huge difference in the success or failure of a retirement plan. This is the key difference between the accumulation phase of investing and the withdrawal phase of investing. Yet the majority of investing writing does not take this key difference into account when Read more…
Hard to believe it has been 2 years since I last updated my recipe for a happy retirement. And 2 years before that I had the original post. Every 2 years seems like a nice interval to revisit my thoughts in this area. We are now getting close to completing Read more…
Today I finally get around to doing something I mentioned way back in my first post on quantitative investing. Quant portfolios can help an investor handily beat the market over time and often with even lower risk. If that is the case then how could they impact safe withdrawal rates Read more…
Most of the ink spilled in talking about retirement is limited to the investment side of the equation. How much do you need for retirement? How much can you withdraw from your portfolio in retirement? How should I invest my retirement assets? And obviously, all these questions are critical. But Read more…
Contrary to the overwhelming consensus at the beginning of the year, bonds have done remarkably well year to date. With that in mind I wanted to update the SWRs for the 100% US TIPs retirement portfolio I presented last year. With rates down, SWRs will be down as well but Read more…