My
Story about the Luck Factor:
I
started investing in 1977. I wrote my first book ("Commission-Free Investing") in 1996 about
Canadian DRIPs and SPPs, to share my personal strategies and experiences with
this form of low-cost investing (before the invention of ETFs). I also started writing articles regularly for a
local personal financial planning magazine called Canadian MoneySaver and met
many great people at their onshore and offshore conferences.
In
1999, my wife asked me a very simple question: “Do we have enough money for
retirement?”. I replied, “Let me check”. Nothing happened for a few weeks.
That is because I could not find much about the mathematics of retirement. Most experts then
were recommending investing all in stocks. All have been touting the “miracle”
of asset allocation. So, when she asked me a second time if we have enough
savings for retirement, I realized that I had to come up with an answer.
I came across two sources that made sense to me: 1. Mr. William Bernstein’s
“Retirement Calculator from Hell”, 2. Mr. William Bengen’s papers on
sustainable withdrawal rate. Other than these two, everything else appeared to
be superficial.
For
about a year or so, I concentrated on understanding the math of distribution
and how it differs from the math of accumulation.
I tried Monte Carlo simulators and soon after, I discovered the perils of the Gaussian mindset that comes with it. Then, I developed my aftcasting technique,
which reflects how retirement portfolios would have performed based on actual
market history and the correlation between the behavior of stocks, conventional
bonds, inflation-indexed bonds, and cash. That is when I discovered the concepts
of Sequence of Returns and Inflation, Time Value of Fluctuations, The Luck
Factor, and so on. I was on a roll, writing one article after another expanding
on these concepts.
In
2000, I started writing my first book on retirement income planning, “High
Expectations and False Dreams - One
Hundred Years of Stock Market History Applied to Retirement Planning”, which I
published in 2001.
My
first article on the sequence of returns was published in the Canadian
MoneySaver magazine in 2000, with the title “Roadmap to Where?”. It got the
attention of the CFP-Board in Denver. They liked it and gave me their article
award for that year:
I
developed my “zone strategy”; segmenting the
outcomes into “green” and “red” zones.
I rewrote this article; this time, lines in charts were in color. The “lucky”
outcome was designated in green and the “unlucky” was in red. It was published
in the Financial Planning (U.S.A.) magazine with the title “Right Road, Wrong Map”:
That
second year at the CFP board, perhaps they had different reviewers evaluating
articles. Or, perhaps it was the same people, but they forgot about reading this
article the year before. It does not matter; they liked my article (again) and
gave me their article award for a second time. It gave me the encouragement to
continue writing.
The
concepts of the sequence of returns, the luck factor, and pooling the risk
(annuities) were all too new for many in this field. I thought I
was the only village idiot with my funny concepts.
It
took several years before mainstream academics started understanding these
concepts. About six years after my first publications about the sequence of
returns, I started seeing articles "introducing" strikingly similar
concepts and strikingly similar graphs (except in the example below; the color
scheme of the lucky and unlucky lines appear to be misplaced):
Finally, I stopped feeling like the only idiot as others were joining the bandwagon. In 2009, I completed and published my 525-page book "Unveiling the Retirement Myth - Advanced Retirement Planning based on Market History".
Nowadays,
most financial professionals are aware of these concepts. However, far too many
academics are still prisoners of their own Gaussian mindset and they still
promote retirement calculators based on Monte Carlo simulators or derivatives of
it.
In the meantime, since making my aftcast spreadsheets available to others in 2004, and after years of feedback from early-adopter users, my aftcast model is now as complete as it gets. It displays all random and fractal events exactly the way they happened.
Here at my website, you can read all my articles, white papers, and CE pieces. You can also download trial version of my aftcast retirement calculators. I hope that the research that I am sharing with you here, helps you make more informed decisions for your or your clients' retirement planning.
I gave close to eight hundred talks and presentations since 1997; almost exclusively to other advisors. I should also add that, because of my paranoia about being late, I was always a couple of hours too early for almost all of them, and I never missed one. After 2013, I slowed down. In 2018, I retired from the financial business.
Nowadays, in addition to giving CE courses to CPAs, I am learning creative writing, and doing a little painting.
This
is my story in a nutshell.
Final word: My friend Kerry Pechter at the Retirement Income Journal summarized my life from a different angle which I loved. It is a great place to visit for retirement knowledge from different experts in the field. I highly recommend it.
I hope you too are blessed with good
luck throughout the remaining of your life.