Bonds , Portfolio , Retirement

Higher Safe Withdrawal Rates from a 100% Bond Portfolio?

Is it possible to achieve higher safe withdrawal rates, compared to a stock/bond portfolio, from a 100% bond portfolio? With bond prices at historical highs? That’s what I wanted to find out. I started thinking in this direction after my look at bottoms up retirement planning and calculating what low real rates are actually needed to achieve retirement success. This…

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Retirement

Safe Withdrawal Rates – insist on 1966

Today I want to touch on a little understood aspect of safe withdrawal rates (SWRs) in retirement. Using the historical method to determine SWRs (as opposed to Monte Carlo analysis) means that the maximum SWR (approx 4%) is singularly determined by one 30 year period, the 30 year retirement period for the 1966 retiree. The 1929 Great Depression retiree had…

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Retirement

Poor future returns and the safety first approach

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 approaches that put the retirement income stream at the top…

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Portfolio , Retirement , Uncategorized

Higher withdrawal rates via diversification & timing

In an earlier post I introduced a method to time the market, based on the 200-day moving average, that produced higher investment returns, lower volatility, and lower drawdowns than a buy and hold portfolio. As I’ve stated here many times lower drawdowns (max principal loss in any period) is critical for retirement portfolios. The fact the retirees need to make…

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Quant Investing , TAA Investing

Comparing Portfolio Performance (1973 To 2020)

Time for my annual post updating statistics for the various portfolios that I track. This is the last post rounding up 2020 statistics. All portfolio stats were gathered using AllocateSmartly, P123, and various other sites like MSCI. Obviously, there are many more portfolio options out there. This is just a sampling of three main portfolio varieties; buy and hold, TAA (tactical…

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Portfolio , TAA Investing

Comparing Portfolio Performance (1973 To 2019)

Time for my annual post updating statistics for the various portfolios that I track. This is the last post rounding up 2019 statististics. All portfolio stats were gathered using AllocateSmartly, P123, various other sites like MSCI, and the wonder that is Excel. Obviously, there are many more portfolio options out there. This is just a sampling of three main portfolio varieties;…

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Portfolio

Comparing Portfolio Performance (1973 To 2018)

Time for my annual post updating statistics for the various portfolios that I track. All portfolio stats were gathered using AllocateSmartly, P123, Morningstar and the wonder that is Excel. Obviously, there are many more portfolio options out there. This is just a sampling of three main portfolio varieties; buy and hold, TAA (tactical asset allocation) and quant portfolios. See my Portfolios page…

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