Do one thing well
“As the manager of your portfolio, you should do one thing really well, and it’s to be a methodical implementer of a predesigned plan.”
– Fortunes & Frictions blogger Rubin Miller, in a well-worth-reading post from 2022. He linked to that earlier post in a 3/6/25 piece about market downturns. Read the recent piece, and find the link to the earlier article, at bit.ly/4i9Yszw.
Generally, don’t fear a downturn…
“At times such as these it is important not to lose sight of the fact that the returns from owning equities over the long run are as high as they are because they are volatile and suffer from intermittent drawdowns. We cannot have one without the other.”
– British investment writer Joe Wiggins, in a 3/18/25 post on his Behavioral Investment blog at bit.ly/4kYloTU.
Unless you’re about to retire
“It’s clear the initial years of retirement are critical to ensuring retirement savings can go the distance. Our research finds that if a retiree emerges from the first five years of retirement unscathed by losses, it substantially reduces the likelihood that he’ll prematurely exhaust his savings. Given this, retirees are well advised to diversify their portfolios to mitigate the risk of early-in-retirement losses that can threaten their savings’ ability to sustain spending over an assumed 30-year horizon.”
– Jeffrey Ptak, managing director for Morningstar Research Services, in a 3/5/25 piece on the Morningstar site. People on the cusp of retirement, he said, should be very intentional about structuring their portfolio to avoid sequence of returns risk. Read more at bit.ly/4iq0kEm.
Words matter
“I actually have completely stopped using the term ‘probability of failure’ in my client meetings.’ Failure in a Monte Carlo simulation does not mean what many people think it does, and it also ignores the fact that people in the real world can and do make adjustments along the way.”
– Financial advisor Michael Kitces, quoted in a 3/7/25 Think Advisor article. He said common financial planning language can do more harm than good. Read more at bit.ly/4huikfA.
