“How much income can I count on from my retirement savings?” With traditional pensions, defined benefit plans, becoming as rare as a good plumber, most of us are stuck figuring this out on our own. The math here is brutal. You don’t know how long you’ll live. You don’t know Read more
On social media, I read many critiques of managed futures strategies…also from people I consider intelligent. These posts got me thinking about a fundamental tension in investing: some of the strategies that work best mathematically are often the hardest to stick with emotionally. The Torture of Positive Skew Managed futures Read more
I found this ETF reading Roger Nusbaum blog. When I first saw the name and website, I instantly dismissed it as a marketing stunt. But Roger continued to mention it, so one day I bit the bullet and dug more. INVESTMENT APPROACHThe Adviser allocates the Fund’s portfolio equally among four Read more
This interview on the Get Stacked Investment Podcast is one of the most interesting I’ve stumbled upon in a long time. Not because the topics discussed are novel. But because the guest is an Europoor like us! Rafael Ortega is a Spanish chap who got the “efficient, diversified portfolio” bug, Read more
I was going through some old posts and realized something surprising: I’ve never written a dedicated piece on risk parity. I could’ve sworn I covered it at some point—maybe under the All Weather umbrella—but apparently not. Chalk it up to the hazards of writing too much (or having a bad Read more
Man AHL dropped a new paper on regime-based investing (link). Think of it as the overachiever’s version of lazy portfolios. Instead of building a portfolio that’s resilient across economic regimes—like the Permanent Portfolio—this approach tries to front-run reality. If we’re in stagflation, why hold anything but cash? Or managed futures, Read more
The CFA Institute produced a detailed report on the historical performance of the 60/40 portfolio (here the link). While the breadth of this study is not as ample as other works, think of the UBS Yearbook, I found some interesting graphs…and the hook to write about potential issues in using Read more
I like David Dredge’s metaphor of a portfolio like a racing car: you do not need to reduce cruise speed when you have brakes. The 60/40 is a car moving always at the same speed, the one that would keep it on the track even on the nastiest turns (what Read more
Here at The Italian Leather Sofa I run a Model Portfolio, an empirical summary of all the concepts around asset allocation and diversification discussed on the blog. It is a short, and hopefully understandable, recap to the “ok, but how do I apply all the theories I read on the Read more
A common theme in this blog’s last few years has been the search for the perfect retirement portfolio. If you are familiar with the ideal goal, you know the challenges to achieve it: longevity and sequence of returns risks, declining cognitive capacity to manage complex assets, various left-tail events, inflation Read more