I was in New York City this week for a short trip to visit our headquarters in Bryant Park, tape some new segments for upcoming podcasts episodes, eat enough to put me into a food coma, see some stand-up comedy, and visit with colleagues and friends.
This included an appearance on Bloomberg IQ to chat with Scarlet Fu about a wide range of topics from the impact of ETFs on markets & behavior, why it’s so difficult for investors to experience losses in bonds, dealing with tracking error in value strategies and why smaller institutional investors should consider ETFs instead of hedge funds:
While at RWM HQ I also sat down with Josh and Michael to discuss my piece from earlier this week about the risk of retiring just before a stock market peak:
I’ve received a ton of feedback, questions and comments on this post. I’m not the first one to look into this stuff by any means but it’s always interesting when you go down one of these rabbit holes because it quickly becomes apparent how difficult it can be to plan for such long time frames in the markets. (See my follow-up piece here).
There’s more garbage-in, garbage-out when creating these assumptions than most people realize. Retirement and financial planning are definitely more art than science. Anyone who tells you they can plan these things out many decades into the future with anything approaching precision is nuts. Retirement planning is harder than it sounds.
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Now here’s what I’ve been reading this week:
- Morgan Housel’s monster piece on how the economy changed following WWII (Collaborative Fund)
- Bear markets are instrument agnostic (Abnormal Returns)
- We’ve known for 85 years forecasters can’t forecast (TEBI)
- 5 lessons from GE’s downfall (Behavioral Value Investor)
- “The only certain advice is to be diversified” (Monevator)
- ‘Fight Club’ but with better jokes (ESPN)
- New Lee Child novel alert (Past Tense)
