Typically, 1/3 or more of the investment choices available in a retirement plan are target date mutual funds. What is a target date fund? How do target date funds work? This article will address those questions and discuss target date funds’ benefits and shortcomings.
Topics: target date funds, target date retirement funds, what is a target date fund, target date mutual funds, Saving for Retirement, Target Date Funds for Retirement
For all the challenges investors face when saving for retirement, one of the easiest ways they can undermine their own efforts is by chasing what’s hot – whether that means chasing certain fund categories or specific funds. One measure of the effect of investor behavior as it pertains to a particular fund is the fund’s investor return. The investor return measures how a fund’s investors performed. This article discusses why investor returns (as represented by Morningstar Investor Return™[1] (MIR)) are different from fund returns and concludes with takeaways and advice for consumers.
Topics: Saving for Retirement, All, working retirement, investor returns, market downturn, investment loss, investing for retirement, fund returns, what returns investors expect
While every investment practitioner knows (or should know) how to derive an efficient frontier under Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT), ask the next investment professional you meet how to select the most appropriate portfolio from the frontier. Chances are they won’t remember. The answer, of course, is to select the one that maximizes expected utility.
What the heck does “maximize expected utility” mean?
Topics: portolio risk, risk vs reward, assymetric risk, risk-neutral scoring, CRRA, BiCRRA, Relative Wealth Ratio, scoring of losses relative to gains, behavioral finance, Business Insights, efficient frontier, risk return tradeoff
