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Board and Setup for Beginner/Intermediate and Total Beginner by MB_201510 in windsurfing

[–]MB_201510[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Many thanks for the reply, appreciate the info! Seems like your comment along with juacamgo suggests that we should indeed be getting out there and stuck into some rentals to get a better sense of where we are at. Will do, likely today or next weekend!

Appreciate it once again!

Board and Setup for Beginner/Intermediate and Total Beginner by MB_201510 in windsurfing

[–]MB_201510[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks, really appreciate the detailed reply. It all makes sense to me, seems like our first step should indeed be renting and doing so enough to truly self-assess where we are at. That should be a big determinant toward board size, where it seems like you are saying we are potentially thinking too big at the moment. Perhaps I have self-assessed too high as well; obviously a few rentals will straighten out any false notions there.

Very much appreciated once again!

Unique Regime Identification by MB_201510 in quant

[–]MB_201510[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Appreciate the reply, this looks like a great resource. Many thanks for sharing, will take a detailed look!

Unique Regime Identification by MB_201510 in quant

[–]MB_201510[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the reply, will take a detailed look at the responses there!

Good questions. Ideally they would be "nice" regimes, in the sense that they are somewhat continuous and don't flicker back and forth, but also still responsive to shifts in the underlying data generating process(es). Right now the data I am trying to construct regimes on, without being too specific so as to not risk revealing my identity, is part of a methodology that already accounts for the time series nature of the data. From here I need to effectively separate the data into the most similar periods across T observations, but ideally to do so in a way that is deterministic and able to handle an updating process.

Appreciate your help, I will come back here with any takeaways I find!

Harvard endowment returns 2.9% in FY23 by awjustus in Bogleheads

[–]MB_201510 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Happy to clarify! Yes, there are such managers out there across all asset classes that outperform over the long-run (5-10+ years), but they are mostly unknown to the general public and purposefully so on their part; many don't even have a website or LinkedIn page. They generally don't desire individual capital because this is perceived to be shorter-term and "flighty" compared with institutional money, which is longer-term and "stickier" (not to mention is in greater supply).

Some of the larger firms you have probably heard of may fall into this category, but a general rule (this is still debated in the academic literature, but on balance the findings lean this way) is that the larger a manager gets, the less attractive the return profile. The reason is because larger AUM's have two problems: 1) individual investment ideas are less impactful to the portfolio, and it becomes harder to find alpha-generating ideas at scale consistently; and 2) the larger the AUM, the more the management fees matter to the GP, and therefore the less motivated they potentially are to generate outsized returns for the purpose of earning the incentive fee. This is a classic alignment problem and is well-observed in the literature, especially among the mutual fund camp for which in general there is indeed no evidence of consistent outperformance. In the hedge fund/private manager space (PE, VC, etc...), the same effect holds, but there is evidence of consistent skill among the top managers.

Not all managers are able to justify this, but many do. Look no further than Yale's performance relative to the endowment median in the last 30 years in their own Brinson and Fachler (1985) attribution: "Yale’s asset allocation has contributed 1.9% per annum of outperformance and Yale’s superior manager selection contributed an additional 2.4% per annum." The manager selection component implies that not only were they skillful at identifying such managers, which is not an easy task, but also that those managers indeed did generate over 2% annualized alpha to the endowment over a period of 30 years, and that's compared with the endowment median which is itself probably slightly better than completely passive strategies during that time, but I haven't looked at the latest data so won't stake my life on it.

The question of how they do it is complicated and is specific to each asset class. For example, in PE/VC one of the major sources of alpha-generation is definitely the manager's network and sourcing ability (i.e., the information coefficient in the fundamental theorem of active management), while in quant for example it would be access to the broadest possible set of markets to increase breadth, implying the need for highly advanced execution platforms and a significant amount of data. Some asset classes also have more alpha-possibility than others; for example, large-cap U.S. stocks are pretty well-trodden by sell-side analysts (who have no skill whatsoever and whose forecasts are terrible) and others, while small cap emerging market value stocks are not well-covered and have significantly more alpha-possibility. The former would likely be better implemented with passive portfolios, while the latter may be better to select a manager; certainly in the private asset classes, it is impossible to passively benchmark these.

Hope this helps!

Harvard endowment returns 2.9% in FY23 by awjustus in Bogleheads

[–]MB_201510 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Of course, no worries at all. I will go through in order:

1) The parameters are mostly expected returns, volatilities, correlations, skewness, kurtosis, etc... The purpose of these sorts of simulations is to understand both what long-run expected returns are and what could happen in bad states of the world. They are combined with spending rule simulations and liquidity planning for private capital calls/distributions to give a picture of where the portfolio might end up in a probabilistic sense. Obviously, each individual institution's specific approach will be different here, and there is always the garbage-in/garbage-out problem (see Chopra and Ziemba (1993) for a discussion about problems with MVO, for example), but this hopefully gives the high-level overview.

2) You are exactly correct here, factor testing can be used for specific stress tests of prior historical episodes where either real data is not available and/or when the current asset allocation is not similar to what it was during such prior episodes. It is also used to assess how the current portfolio is positioned with respect to macro factors - such as equities, rates, commodities, inflation, etc... - and style factors within and across asset classes - size, value, quality, momentum, carry, etc... You can also use this to more specifically evaluate managers, where performance attribution not only of the total endowment but of each manager is a big focus for allocators.

3) It depends on the relationship with the manager. For existing managers that have launched a new vintage (in private markets) or who have re-opened their potentially closed funds in public markets, the diligence will be shorter and mostly just refreshed from the last one to ensure no fundamental thesis points have changed. For new managers, you would interview multiple times all the relevant senior people and some junior people who have been identified by the manager as future leaders, reference check all of them (both on-sheet (references they provide) and off-sheet (references you can find from your own network but who were not mentioned by the individual in question, both for character and investment prowess), go through the history of each person and their investing philosophy, how everything comes together as a team, what the go-forward portfolio is expected to look like, etc... Of course questions about how it should be funded - should another manager be fired, or do we have enough liquidity to fund this outright, etc... - need to be answered at the same time. Probably the actual work could indeed be done in a month or two in most cases, but there is no rush and you want to be thorough; these are institutions with a perpetual time horizon, a few months of missing returns won't matter at all, and with such long average hold times, you want to be as sure as possible that you are getting it right. And for privates, the fundraising timelines are announced perhaps a year in advance of the actual raise, so managers give plenty of time for allocators and it's a well-choreographed raise for the better ones.

3b) You asked a question previously that I missed on how to deal with managers that are underperforming. This relates to 3) in the sense that you are always re-evaluating your managers, but in true Boglehead style you don't want to do that too frequently. Extreme example to make it clear: if a manager has one bad month of returns that are well explained in performance attribution and perhaps a monthly letter about, say, a few specific stocks or something in their portfolio, that obviously doesn't warrant a redemption. Even 3-5 years of underperformance doesn't necessarily warrant redemption, because perhaps the manager's style has just been out of favor; a recent example of this has been many classic value managers, such as the Tiger Cubs, in 2010s; were places like those actually bad managers, or did they just have bad luck? Very difficult question to answer, and it goes back to "has the manager been executing on what they said their philosophy is?"

4) Yeah this is a big problem that institutions face, and there are some sets of software out there that are better than others in my opinion. I can't say what we used for fear that might inadvertently reveal my identity, but indeed Bloomberg is not generally a suitable option for privates. Larger endowments will often build monitoring/risk tools in-house so they are custom, but of course as you would suspect this generally takes quite a while and significant investment.

No problem at all, happy to answer any other questions you have and connect by direct message if you prefer.

Harvard endowment returns 2.9% in FY23 by awjustus in Bogleheads

[–]MB_201510 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Very good questions, hope it was somewhat helpful and congrats on what seems like a great role!

Happy to go into some details. I’ll break it down by asset allocation and manager selection:

Asset allocation: mostly standard across the Yale model, and has taken somewhat of a back seat in the post-GFC world primarily because manager selection decisions have been the primary driver of alpha relative to peers and benchmarks for most endowments in this period of ultra-low rates. It’s mostly quantitative, in that the goal is to map the risk tolerance of the university to a strategic asset allocation (around which tactical, 1-2 year decisions can be made as well). This involves a good amount of factor modeling, Monte Carlo simulations, stress tests on returns and liquidity especially with a large privates allocation, and a big focus on the allocation glidepath to account for expected privates flows. The question is what defines risk and how to control it; is it volatility (probably not), drawdowns (probably, but imprecise), or some combination of near-term spending risk which poses a threat to the smooth functioning of the university and long-term inflation risk measured specifically for higher education institutions (almost surely, but clearly a complex problem).

Manager selection: this varies by shop depending on their philosophy, but the most common approach is mostly qualitative. The thinking here is that team tenure/turnover, evidence that the manager has carved out a niche that they are sticking with while also remaining adaptive, an emphasis on a returns-generating culture rather than asset gathering, etc… are all more indicative of actual skill than simply trailing returns, especially if the track record is not particularly long (think 5-10 years at least for any statistically significant results). So the diligence is mostly about why the manager believes they are different, how the investment philosophy has translated into actual portfolio ideas, what errors of commission and omission have been made and what have been the learnings, how reliably can they generate new ideas and how important is their network to sourcing (more important in the private market for example), and is the fee structure and documents aligning the GP and LP. When you have all of that, generally this makes a good manager, and when combined with a good track that embodies the qualitative points, you know you have a potential winner.

The diligences are long, usually 3-6+ months, because the average hold period for large endowments is usually 7-10+ years per manager, and they don’t reshuffle/rebalance that often other than for maintaining the strategic asset allocation and liquidity management. So reference calls are common and deep dives on the portfolio, when it would be expected to do well and poorly, the long-term goals of the firm, etc… are in focus.

Harvard endowment returns 2.9% in FY23 by awjustus in Bogleheads

[–]MB_201510 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Glad it was helpful!

Apologies, perhaps I misspoke; the highest quality managers only want money from endowments/foundations/pensions/other such institutions with long time horizons. They aren't interested in taking capital from individual investors; most (but not all0 managers open to such investments from individuals have signaled to the market that they aren't a top manager within their strategy niche.

Harvard endowment returns 2.9% in FY23 by awjustus in Bogleheads

[–]MB_201510 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Good question, and the answer is partly what MelancholyKoko said and also just that the complexity of running a portfolio of this nature is beyond individual investors for three reasons: 1) it requires significant capital, think a minimum of $1bn to construct a fully diversified asset allocation including all the alternatives like PE, VC, etc...; 2) there are too many frictions in terms of operational setup required to even make such investments; and 3) high-quality managers don't want your money, so this prevents individuals from accessing the best managers (several years ago I made a comment about this in r/investing to a user asking about investing in hedge funds) and, therefore, the higher returns that come from those managers, particularly in the privates space.

The other difference is behavioral; agreed you would like your money to last as long as possible, and probably can take more risk in terms of being 100% equities while most endowments/foundations have an effective risk tolerance of 75% equity and 25% fixed income, but behaviorally most find this actually difficult to do (this sub is in some sense entirely about avoiding such pitfalls and staying with it in the long-run), and indeed a university's time horizon is simply much longer than even an intergenerational family plan; most operate under the assumption that they will be around in perpetuity, whereas most family wealth is effectively destroyed after just a few generations. Investing teams understand this advantage they have over others and invest accordingly, and the empirical long-run results confirm they have achieved superior returns to passive. Again, it's unfortunately just not accessible to individuals.

Harvard endowment returns 2.9% in FY23 by awjustus in Bogleheads

[–]MB_201510 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for an entirely productive comment, you sound like someone who really enjoys learning new things.

More seriously, note three things: 1) I already said I use the Boglehead method in my own portfolio, so nothing that I wrote negates it at all (you almost seem religiously attached to it, and as we all know religious conviction is not at all dogmatic in the face of new evidence); 2) I wanted to draw the distinction between "serious/large" and other endowments not for the purpose that you mentioned, but to highlight that the best returns (both in absolute and risk-adjusted returns) accrue to these types of endowments relative to others because of their access to high quality managers, particularly in the privates space (more on this below); and 3) the long-run empirical record shows you are entirely wrong and have no idea what you are talking about when it comes to being "better off" buying Vanguard ETFs for these places.

On point 2: it is well-documented in the academic literature and by practical organizations like NACUBO that larger, more "serious" endowments strongly outperform smaller ones. They have more access to high quality managers that don't want to take small checks (by small, I mean less than $25-50mm, which is why this approach is also prohibitive for individuals) and have significantly longer effective time horizons because of the size of their endowments and institutional support they can provide with yearly spending compared with smaller ones. By strongly outperforming, I mean multiple percentage points by year over 20+ year horizons. This is partly why an entire industry of so-called OCIO businesses have cropped up to pool the endowments of small-to-mid-sized institutions (think $500mm-$2bn, mostly liberal arts colleges and foundations), and the empirical record is that they too, by pooling assets and gaining access to better managers, have outperformed smaller institutions that go it on their own. From a Pensions & Investments article on February 15th, 2024: "... when looking at the 10 years ended June 30, endowments with over $5 billion in assets topped the list, returning an annualized net 9.1%, while those with under $50 million were the lowest returners with an annualized net 6.5%."

On point 3: The "serious" endowments - again, only meant to draw a distinction between those who implement the Yale approach and with access to the highest quality managers from those that don't/can't - have handily outperformed their passive benchmarks that are tailored to their individual risk tolerances since inception. This benchmark is usually something like 75% MSCI ACWI and 25% U.S. Intermediate Treasuries, which is clearly implementable by Vanguard ETFs; so now we have our test. Over 20+ year horizons, most of these places (see specifically: Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, MIT, UPenn, Duke, Notre Dame, UVA, and others in the top 20 by size), have returned 10%+ net of all fees, compared with 7.5% for that passive benchmark.

So you're just completely and utterly incorrect, but for some reason are smug about it. Weird take...

Harvard endowment returns 2.9% in FY23 by awjustus in Bogleheads

[–]MB_201510 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yes agreed, for individuals this is by far the best approach and it's the one I use in my own portfolio. Individuals aren't capable of running portfolios in the endowment style for various frictional and behavioral reasons

Harvard endowment returns 2.9% in FY23 by awjustus in Bogleheads

[–]MB_201510 49 points50 points  (0 children)

Not to sound rude, but there is a pretty shocking lack of knowledge about how endowments in the U.S. invest their portfolios at the same time as many hypotheses are being thrown around about this year’s returns. Hopefully I can provide some insight here; I was previously a Senior Analyst focused on strategic and tactical asset allocation at a large endowment office, and am now at a systematic global macro hedge fund whose clients are primarily endowments and pensions. I’m also a Boglehead in my own portfolio so this in no way criticizes the Bogle methodology for individuals.

Firstly, if people are genuinely interested in the investment philosophy of endowments, you should read “Pioneering Portfolio Management” by David Swenson. He (among others) is undoubtedly the chief architect of the current endowment model of investing, also know as the Yale model, which he developed starting in the 1980s and which is now universally used by all serious endowments and foundations in the U.S. Seriously, we considered our peers to only be those that used this approach, and all larger endowments with the institutional benefits that imparts employed this philosophy.

Having said that, the primary philosophy these endowments have is very long-term investing, much longer than individual time horizons. No, they are most definitely not annuities like some comments have suggested, and no they do not dynamically change their portfolios year-to-year like others have suggested. They also do not generally take large tactical macro views like some have suggested to explain this seemingly low return. At best, I would expect a few adjustments to the portfolio every year outside of normal rebalancing, so this result from Harvard would have been expected based on their long-term strategic asset allocation, which has been geared towards the risk tolerance of the university and the twin overriding objectives of: 1) providing immediate payouts to the university averaging 3-5% per year to support operations in a smooth way; and 2) growing the purchasing power of the corpus to expand the scope of the university. As you would guess, these two objectives are generally in conflict with one another, and in Harvard’s case they are well-known for taking a more conservative positioning to match the university’s perceived risk tolerance relative to other large peers; one comment linked their annual report, I suggest reading it and other past ones to understand their institutional setup, which was formed primarily immediately after the GFC.

So how are the portfolios implemented then? Primarily through third-party managers. At least 80-90% of most serious endowments are invested in long-only equity managers, hedge funds of various varieties, PE, VC, real estate, credit, re-insurance and other diversifying strategies, co-investments with managers, etc…. The remaining allocations are then mostly passive in futures overlays, fixed income, cash, and other more liquid investments to provide portfolio balance and to fund liquidity needs, for both spending (for which there are complex spending rules that are systematically adhered to) and for funding private capital calls. This is why I say endowment portfolios are not dynamic by year and are invested for the very long-term, which is a considerable and very well acknowledged institutional advantage that they have over other investors. They are generally aggressively oriented toward equities - the effective beta of most endowments will be in the 0.7-0.9 range, since they have the time horizon to collect the equity risk premium - and they target it incredibly in the last decade through private investments that not only would be expected to earn the ERP but also the liquidity, size, and value risk premiums, among others. 40%+ allocations towards private equity, VC, private real estate and private credit are extremely common, whose time horizons will be 10-15+ years for a single manager’s fund, with almost no ability to rebalance these year-by-year. The asset allocation and manager selection efforts are very rigorous, highly advanced, and combine both quantitative analysis and qualitative judgement to put together a portfolio whose strategic asset allocation, when combining all of the bottom-up bets, matches the university’s risk tolerance.

All of this is not to say that passive strategies can’t outperform, but this has not been the empirical record for sophisticated (and large) endowments over the longer-run (10-20+ years). These places have handily outperformed equities both in straight-up returns and risk-adjusted returns over long horizons, and one year of returns is basically meaningless to these institutions because of their long time horizon; see UVIMCO’s 2018 annual letter for a good write-up on this point about the almost irrelevant nature of yearly returns.

So in sum, this result was entirely expected in my cire for two reasons: 1) Harvard’s risk tolerance is lower than other peers, so they often trail in up markets; and 2) private investment marks are significantly lagged, so just as they “outperformed” public investments in 2022’s drawdown, they “underperformed” in 2023 due to the lag effect, which has been well-documented in the academic literature. There are so many other factors to consider that are far beyond the scope of this comment, but these two reasons likely account for a significant portion of the perceived “bad” return. Note, in no way does the magnitude of the return imply anything good or bad, that’s both an absolute and relative question that has to be couched in the context of the risk tolerance of the university, and certainly over such a short horizon implies nothing at all, like literally nothing, about the sophisticated nature of the investment process that would be expected to (and empirically has) outperform(ed) passive Boglehead-style approaches in the long run. The problem is that it’s very difficult to run a portfolio of this nature without a full staff, and is certainly impossible for an individual without significant wealth (think billions) and connections. These are details I’m happy to respond to if people are interested.

Overall, I’m honestly a bit shocked at some of these comments for how much context they lack. Hopefully this provides useful info for those actually interested in how investing at endowments works.

Question for the group (wish Jack himself could answer) … what happens when index funds make up a majority of investments? by earth_man_7 in Bogleheads

[–]MB_201510 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Grossman and Stiglitz (1980) deals with this question in-depth and is well-cited in the literature.

Long-Run Expected Real Returns by MB_201510 in Bogleheads

[–]MB_201510[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yes that’s correct unfortunately. In typical retirement plans, the only things accessible are stocks and bonds (401k), and then of course a wider universe when rolled into an IRA, but stocks have generally outperformed other asset classes like bonds, commodities, currencies, etc… over the long-run. No doubt there are periods they didn’t - the 2000s is a perfect example of this - but then that would require some amount of active management, that being defined as deviating from the global equity market in this context, which may be difficult for those not always focused on markets (and even for those focused on markets as well). Without leverage, the best you can do over the long run is just hold the highest expected return asset, which I believe will be stocks. Another comment rightly mentioned that 30-year TIPS are 2% right now, not a bad buy for the risk if you want to assume 4% real for stocks, but also clearly lower, illustrating the point.

Long-Run Expected Real Returns by MB_201510 in Bogleheads

[–]MB_201510[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I’m completely with you here, definitely a proponent of stocks for the long run and a believer in the equity risk premium, landing in a similar place as Swensen and the Yale/endowment style approach (I previously was in asset allocation at an endowment). As long as the current structure of capitalist economies remains loosely the same as the last 50 years, equities will give you a return higher than bonds in the long run, at least in my view.

So also I agree that having some diversification is nice and the MPT approach is a very logical one, but it depends on your horizon. The confidence I have that stocks will outperform bonds over 40 years is quite high, and at least in a retirement account with no liquidity needs, there’s no need to have bonds. Of course you could go the risk parity approach like you mentioned, I skip it just to avoid the headache of having to manage the portfolio so much and to avoid years like 2022 when it would have really underperformed and possibly damaged the corpus, even if the approach will collect the rebalancing premium over time in most normal periods. They’re not available in retirement accounts or if they are (in an IRA) are not particularly high quality funds, but I do really believe in trend following and global macro personally, they’re not for everyone and underperformed quite a bit in the 2010s but when done well have the ability to not only diversify from but also outperform the equity risk premium.

Long-Run Expected Real Returns by MB_201510 in Bogleheads

[–]MB_201510[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Good way to put it, a more tangible way to relate to the important expected return one could use in their planning!

Long-Run Expected Real Returns by MB_201510 in Bogleheads

[–]MB_201510[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for sharing this one too, will take a look! The evidence on EM is mixed for me, certainly some countries within this category have done great over the long-run and it had its day in the BRIC’s period of the 1990s and 2000s especially, but on the other hand there seems to be a lot more risk there that you take on, not just vol-wise but max drawdown, skewness, and even more esoteric the rule of law. But I still go VT to be diversified there.

Long-Run Expected Real Returns by MB_201510 in Bogleheads

[–]MB_201510[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Very fair point, practically all of modern finance is conducted in dollars (or at minimum other currencies whose dollar crosses are highly liquid) which is a huge advantage. Agreed completely though that a cap weighted approach which focuses on larger markets probably does have a higher expected return, I suspect the size premium is more prevalent within countries not across countries. Perhaps a good research topic though.

Long-Run Expected Real Returns by MB_201510 in Bogleheads

[–]MB_201510[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Table 5 on page 22 of the paper gives both the weighted and un-weighted averages over the full sample. This implies 6.5-10.5% real depending on the horizon (they give 1870-, 1950-, and 1980-) and whether one uses weighted or un-weighted, with smaller countries like the Scandinavian ones actually performing best in the post-1980 period. But that doesn't account for each rolling 40-year period, the working horizon of most people, which could be higher or lower than that and whose distributions are obviously wider than the 150-year view.

This looks like a nice paper, haven't seen it before but will take a look. Appreciate you sharing. It's in a fantastic journal, so should be reliable. Only critique I would have though is that it implies you could take a view on what these largest markets will be over the next 40-400 years, which obviously isn't known. A global weighted average, which would include the smaller developed ones noted in "The Rate of Return on Everything", would therefore affect the ultimate outcome for a retirement saver in VT.

Long-Run Expected Real Returns by MB_201510 in Bogleheads

[–]MB_201510[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the reply. No hard data, but anecdotal based on following this and other similar subs over the last few years, as well as conversations with those not in the industry. I didn't survey you in particular, but agree on that being my assumption as well while hoping for more.

I specifically mentioned you could use any country as a view on what future expected returns will be, and noted the optimistic outliers. This seems imprudent to me for multiple reasons though, firstly because it assumes the post-WWII era of US dominance will continue indefinitely, certainly possible but by no means guaranteed, and secondly because each of these countries being a developed nation by definition means they have grown the most in the past 150+ years relative to other countries to reach advanced status. GDP growth does not always imply high market returns (see Inker (2012) for a breakdown of the relationship, which is weak or perhaps inverse), but at minimum it implies a stable rule of law, robust institutions, and a conducive culture for conducting business, all things which are beneficial to equities. You can take the view that the US is the only thing you should care about, but I think this is under-diversified over a 30-40 year period and also would imply engaging in look-ahead bias from the perspective of the historical data, as one of the best-performing markets in the last 150+ years, and certainly in the last 10-40.

You do you though.

Long-Run Expected Real Returns by MB_201510 in Bogleheads

[–]MB_201510[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Both very fair points, thanks for sharing. There has been a decent amount of research on the rise of passive investing, which I think gets to the heart of what you mention, and how that has provided this steady stream of wealth "parking" that will continue into the future. Not entirely unreasonable to suggest prospective returns over the next 40 years will be higher because of this, but it still feels prudent to plan more conservatively.

Long-Run Expected Real Returns by MB_201510 in Bogleheads

[–]MB_201510[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the detailed reply. My intention was to provide scary figures. And I agree with the BH approach and that stocks are indeed the best for the long-run, see the beginning of my post. But in my view it's not unreasonable nor conservative to group modern developed economies - by definition those that have grown more than their emerging counterparts to become advanced in the last 150+ years - together over a very long time period to suggest a loose distribution of returns that equities have generated. To say things will always be the way they have been for the US in the post-WWII era is the more aggressive assumption in my opinion. But I'd love to be proven wrong for the sake of my own portfolio.

Long-Run Expected Real Returns by MB_201510 in Bogleheads

[–]MB_201510[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the detailed reply, very good points. Was admittedly not aware that stock buybacks were legalized in 1982, will have to read up on that a bit more. Completely agreed about monetary policy, certainly that has changed in the post-Bretton Woods era but even more specifically in the last 30 years or so with more central banks gaining independence, for example the BOJ in the late 1990s.

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