Balancing Short-term and Long-term Portfolio Risks
April 18, 2016 - Strategic Allocation
How should investors (particularly retirees) think about balancing short-term crash risk and long-term portfolio sustainability? In their March 2016 paper entitled “Asset Allocation with Short and Long Term Risk Objectives”, Peng Wang and Jon Spinney present a way to balance short-term and long-term portfolio performance risks. They consider portfolios that each month allocate all funds in fixed weights to a mix of stocks (MSCI ACWI Index), bonds (Barclays U.S. Aggregate Index) and real estate investment trusts (MSCI Global REIT Index). They measure short term risk as the average of the worst 1% of annual returns from 10,000 bootstrapping simulations that randomly draw three months of returns at a time from 20-year historical pool of returns for these indexes, thereby preserving some monthly return autocorrelations and cross-correlations. They measure long-term risk as the probability that portfolio value is below its initial value after ten years from 10,000 Monte‐Carlo simulations based on expected asset class returns, pairwise asset return correlations, inflation, investment alpha (baseline constant 1% annually) and withdrawals (baseline approximately 5% annual real rate). Using monthly returns for the asset class proxies during January 1995 through October 2015 and longer samples to estimate ten-year returns and return correlations, they find that: Keep Reading