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Adjustments For A Conservative Return Assumption
Consider three scenarios: An individual investing a lump-sum amount for thirty years An individual saving a fixed percentage of a constant inflation-adjusted salary at the end of each year over a thirty-year accumulation period An individual withdrawin…
Read MoreA Guide to a Conservative Return Assumption
A simple approach for building a financial plan is to decide on a rate of return for the investment portfolio and to plug that value into a spreadsheet to represent assumed asset growth. Historical data may be used to calculate historical average retur…
Read MorePlanning For The Future – What About Bond Yields?
Adjustments for Current Bond Yields An important consideration is that current interest rates are lower than the historical averages. The historical average return is not relevant for someone seeking to estimate future market returns from today’s start…
Read MoreUnpacking Today’s Market Return
Today, March 9th, 2020, was a bad day for the market returns. There are four main elements to this story that I want to pick apart…
Read MoreInflation, Deflation, Confiscation & Devastation- The Four Horsemen Of Risk
Noted financial advisor and historian William Bernstein makes a compelling case for stocks in his e-book Deep Risk: How History Informs Portfolio Design. In the introduction, Bernstein begins by offering an operational definition of risk. Risk is the s…
Read MoreLessons for the Next Crisis
We wrote this in 2017 and it remains just as relevant today. In early October 2007, the S&P 500 Index hit what was its highest point before losing more than half its value over the next year and a half during the global financial crisis. Over the coming weeks and months, as other anniversaries of…
Read MoreThe Coronavirus and Your Investments
The Coronavirus is scary. Aside from the reasonable health precautions that you should be taking, what should you be doing to protect your investments from the disruptions that the Coronavirus may cause?
Read MoreThe Role of Duration-Matched Bonds in Retirement Planning
When building an investment portfolio for wealth accumulation, the primary focus is maximizing returns while managing risk. However, in retirement planning, the goal shifts from simply growing wealth to ensuring a reliable income stream. This calls for a more strategic approach to asset allocation—one that aligns investment choices with future spending needs. Duration-matched bonds offer…
Read MoreAre Stocks Safer in the Long-Term?
When you’re investing, you need to focus on the long-term. This is one of those pieces of received wisdom that everyone has heard, and most people at least pretend to believe it, but it’s often wildly misinterpreted. There’s this idea out there that stocks get safer the longer you hold onto them because you can…
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