Lifecycle Investing

Lifecycle Investing
Author: Ian Ayres
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2010-05
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1458758427

Diversification provides a well-known way of getting something close to a free lunch: by spreading money across different kinds of investments, investors can earn the same return with lower risk (or a much higher return for the same amount of risk). This strategy, introduced nearly fifty years ago, led to such strategies as index funds. What if we were all missing out on another free lunch that’s right under our noses? InLifecycle Investing, Barry Nalebuff and Ian Ayres-two of the most innovative thinkers in business, law, and economics-have developed tools that will allow nearly any investor to diversify their portfolios over time. By using leveraging when young-a controversial idea that sparked hate mail when the authors first floated it in the pages ofForbes-investors of all stripes, from those just starting to plan to those getting ready to retire, can substantially reduce overall risk while improving their returns. InLifecycle Investing, readers will learn How to figure out the level of exposure and leverage that’s right foryou How the Lifecycle Investing strategy would have performed in the historical market Why it will work even if everyone does it Whennotto adopt the Lifecycle Investing strategy Clearly written and backed by rigorous research,Lifecycle Investingpresents a simple but radical idea that will shake up how we think about retirement investing even as it provides a healthier nest egg in a nicely feathered nest.

Asset Market Participation and Portfolio Choice Over the Life Cycle

Asset Market Participation and Portfolio Choice Over the Life Cycle
Author: Andreas Fagereng
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013
Genre: Portfolio management
ISBN:

We study the life cycle of portfolio allocation following for 15 years a large random sample of Norwegian households using error-free data on all components of households' investments drawn from the Tax Registry. Both, participation in the stock market and the portfolio share in stocks, have important life cycle patterns. Participation is limited at all ages but follows a hump-shaped profile which peaks around retirement; the share invested in stocks among the participants is high and flat for the young but investors start reducing it as retirement comes into sight. Our data suggest a double adjustment as people age: a rebalancing of the portfolio away from stocks as they approach retirement, and stock market exit after retirement. Existing calibrated life cycle models can account for the first behavior but not the second. We show that incorporating in these models a reasonable per period participation cost can generate limited participation among the young but not enough exit from the stock market among the elderly. Adding also a small probability of a large loss when investing in stocks, produces a joint pattern of participation and of the risky asset share that is similar to the one observed in the data. A structural estimation of the relevant parameters of the model reveals that the parameter combination that fits the data best is one with a relatively large risk aversion, small participation cost and a yearly large loss probability of around 1.3 percent.

Household Portfolio Allocation Over the Life Cycle

Household Portfolio Allocation Over the Life Cycle
Author: James M. Poterba
Publisher:
Total Pages: 68
Release: 1997
Genre: Age groups
ISBN:

In this paper, we analyze the relationship between age and portfolio structure for households in the US. We focus on both the probability that households of different ages own particular portfolio assets and the fraction of their net worth allocated to each asset category. We distinguish between age and cohort effects using data from the repeated cross-sections of the Federal Reserve Board's Surveys of Consumer Finances. We present two broad conclusions. First, there are important differences across asset classes in both the age-specific probabilities of asset ownership and in the portfolio shares of different assets at different ages. The notnion that all assets can be treated as identical from the standpoint of analyzing household wealth accumulation is not supported by the data. Institutional factors, asset liquidity, and evolving investor tastes must be recognized in modeling asset demand. These factors could affect analyses of overall household saving as well as the composition of this saving. Second, there are evident differences in the asset ownership probabilities of different birth cohorts. Currently, older households were more likely to hold corporate stock, and less likely to hold tax-exempt bonds, than younger households at any given age. These differences across cohorts are important to recognize when analyzing asset accumulation profiles.

Strategic Asset Allocation

Strategic Asset Allocation
Author: John Y. Campbell
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2002-01-03
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 019160691X

Academic finance has had a remarkable impact on many financial services. Yet long-term investors have received curiously little guidance from academic financial economists. Mean-variance analysis, developed almost fifty years ago, has provided a basic paradigm for portfolio choice. This approach usefully emphasizes the ability of diversification to reduce risk, but it ignores several critically important factors. Most notably, the analysis is static; it assumes that investors care only about risks to wealth one period ahead. However, many investors—-both individuals and institutions such as charitable foundations or universities—-seek to finance a stream of consumption over a long lifetime. In addition, mean-variance analysis treats financial wealth in isolation from income. Long-term investors typically receive a stream of income and use it, along with financial wealth, to support their consumption. At the theoretical level, it is well understood that the solution to a long-term portfolio choice problem can be very different from the solution to a short-term problem. Long-term investors care about intertemporal shocks to investment opportunities and labor income as well as shocks to wealth itself, and they may use financial assets to hedge their intertemporal risks. This should be important in practice because there is a great deal of empirical evidence that investment opportunities—-both interest rates and risk premia on bonds and stocks—-vary through time. Yet this insight has had little influence on investment practice because it is hard to solve for optimal portfolios in intertemporal models. This book seeks to develop the intertemporal approach into an empirical paradigm that can compete with the standard mean-variance analysis. The book shows that long-term inflation-indexed bonds are the riskless asset for long-term investors, it explains the conditions under which stocks are safer assets for long-term than for short-term investors, and it shows how labor income influences portfolio choice. These results shed new light on the rules of thumb used by financial planners. The book explains recent advances in both analytical and numerical methods, and shows how they can be used to understand the portfolio choice problems of long-term investors.

Simple Allocation Rules and Optimal Portfolio Choice Over the Lifecycle

Simple Allocation Rules and Optimal Portfolio Choice Over the Lifecycle
Author: Victor Duarte
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2021
Genre:
ISBN:

We develop a machine-learning solution algorithm to solve for optimal portfolio choice in a detailed and quantitatively-accurate lifecycle model that includes many features of reality modelled only separately in previous work. We use the quantitative model to evaluate the consumption-equivalent welfare losses from using simple rules for portfolio allocation across stocks, bonds, and liquid accounts instead of the optimal portfolio choices. We find that the consumption-equivalent losses from using an age-dependent rule as embedded in current target-date/lifecycle funds (TDFs) are substantial, around 2 to 3 percent of consumption, despite the fact that TDF rules mimic average optimal behavior by age closely until shortly before retirement. Our model recommends higher average equity shares in the second half of life than the portfolio of the typical TDF, so that the typical TDF portfolio does not improve on investing an age-independent 2/3 share in equity. Finally, optimal equity shares have substantial heterogeneity, particularly by wealth level, state of the business cycle, and dividend-price ratio, implying substantial gains to further customization of advice or TDFs in these dimensions.

Pay Yourself First

Pay Yourself First
Author: Timothy W. Cunningham
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 292
Release: 1996-09-28
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780471162483

Written by the founders of the Life Cycle Mutual Funds, a revolutionary age- and solution-based family of mutual funds, this guide demystifies the principles of retirement investing and shows readers how to take charge of their financial future. Using real-life anecdotes and examples, this text focuses on the human element involved in retirement planning. 20 charts.

Learning, Ambiguity and Life-Cycle Portfolio Allocation

Learning, Ambiguity and Life-Cycle Portfolio Allocation
Author: Claudio Campanale
Publisher:
Total Pages: 55
Release: 2008
Genre:
ISBN:

In the present paper I develop a life-cycle portfolio choice model where agents perceive stock returns to be ambiguous and are ambiguity averse. As in Epstein and Schneider (2005) part of the ambiguity vanishes over time as a consequence of learning over observed returns. The model shows that ambiguity alone can rationalize moderate stock market participation rates and conditional shares with reasonable participation costs but has strongly counterfactual implications for conditional allocations to stocks by age and wealth. When learning is allowed, conditional shares over the life-cycle are instead aligned with the empirical evidence and patterns of stock holdings over the wealth distribution get closer to the data.

Habit Formation and Lifetime Portfolio Selection

Habit Formation and Lifetime Portfolio Selection
Author: Yoel Lax
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2001
Genre:
ISBN:

A life cycle model in which an investor (a) faces i.i.d. asset returns, (b) receives no non-asset income, and (c) has an iso-elastic period utility function, predicts that the investor will allocate a constant fraction of his wealth to risky securities over his lifetime. This result is at odds with both economic intuition and the empirical evidence on asset allocation of individuals. In this work we investigate the effect that habit formation has on life cycle portfolio allocation. This amounts to relaxing assumption (c) by making period utility dependent on past consumption. We derive the optimal consumption and investment policies for a finitely-lived investor in discrete time and find that habit formation can explain increasingly conservative as well as hump-shaped investment patterns over the life cycle, both of which have been documented empirically. The crucial element determining which pattern obtains is the initial habit of a young investor. Furthermore we find that habit formation induces much stronger life cycle effects than those obtained by relaxing either assumptions (a) or (b): Return predictability is of negligible importance in a habit formation model, and labor income alone cannot generate hump-shaped investment patterns. Next we show that our basic results are robust to whether habit formation is introduced into the utility function as a difference or ratio, and to whether the habit stock consists of only one lag or a distributed lag of consumption. In contrast, the endogeneity of habit is crucial to our results--a model with a constant subsistence level, which is nested in our more general model, cannot produce the same life cycle investment patterns. Finally, we show that a continuous-time version of our habit model yields qualitatively different results.