Research & News
Wings of the Black Swan
In this article, Asset Dedication’s research team provided empirical evidence of why the short-term turbulence in the market that always generates alarmist headlines is best ignored based on historical perspectives of long-term results. Short-term market returns are not normally distributed. They have very fat tails – many returns over 10 standard deviations from the mean!
Update on Award-winning Asset Dedication Article
Asset Dedication recently published “U.S. Asset Class Returns Based on Time Horizons, Size, and Style” in the latest edition of the Retirement Management Journal (click here). It is an update to the 2018 paper “Safety Zones, Danger Zones, and the Critical Path: Visualizing U.S. Asset Class Returns Based on Time Horizons, Size, and Style,” which won the 2019 Journal Research Award given by the Investment & Wealth Institute published originally in Retirement Management Journal Vol. 7, No. 1 ,2018 (click here). The original paper included an analysis not only of long-term return patterns, it also outlined the unique dedicated portfolio strategy pioneered by Asset Dedication for personal finance in our book. A PowerPoint slide deck of the most recent article can be downloaded here.
Fighting Recency Bias
Projecting the future based on recent events is built into our instinctive circuitry but, as we all know, basing investment decisions on the latest market fluctuations works against long-term returns. This article maps out one-day correlations for returns of the S&P 500 index since 1928, and other tables show correlations over 5 trading days, four weeks, 12 months and four quarters—and all of them are weak. With annual data, the correlations gradually increase with each additional year of time horizon. Strong correlations do occur but only when dealing with decades: higher returns over a 15 year span are correlated with lower returns the following 20-year span (r = – .91) due to the constant tendency toward reversion to the mean long-term return.
Periodic Tables – A White Paper
Bob Veres, perhaps the best-known commentator and reviewer of financial advising articles, gave a very favorable review of this white paper in the August 2020 edition of Inside Information. The periodic table of asset returns is among the most widely used visual image to demonstrate the randomness of returns but only for one-year time horizons. This white paper presents periodic tables for longer time horizons, stretching out to 30 years. Using statistical analysis, the research reveals that over longer spans, much of the randomness vanishes, with rank correlations reaching 85%.
How Dedicated Portfolios Reduce Behavioral Risk
The article reviews how portfolios based on dedicated portfolio theory were made for volatile times like these and tend to hold up much better than portfolios based on modern portfolio theory. The recent market turmoil in both the stock and the bond market put clients’ financial plans under pressure, however we show how the Asset Dedication approach helps reduce some of the risks in ways that MPT and other approaches do not.
Asset Dedication Wins Award for Research on Long Term Investing
The Investment & Wealth Institute awarded Asset Dedication’s Stephen J. Huxley, Ph.D. and Brent Burns, MBA, the 2019 Journal Research Award for their paper “Safety Zones, Danger Zones, and the Critical Path: Visualizing U.S. Asset Class Returns Based on Time Horizons, Size, and Style,” published in the Retirement Management Journal, Vol. 7, No. 1 (2018). The paper included an analysis not only of long-term return patterns, it also outlined the unique dedicated portfolio pioneered by Asset Dedication for personal finance as outlined in our book. The award was given at the IWI conference in Las Vegas, May 5-7, 2019. Click here to read the paper. >>