Life Expectancy at Retirement

March 1, 2010

Source: The Economist, via Greg Mankiw.

Americans, as well as citizens of many other advanced nations, now spend about twice as many years in retirement as they did a generation or two ago. Aggressive saving and adherence to a well-thought-out investment plan are more important today than they have ever been. It is a big mistake for today’s 65-year olds to no longer consider themselves to be “long-term investors.”


Strategic Asset Allocators Finally Cave

March 1, 2010

According to Investment News, the hot new trend in target date funds is…tactical asset allocation!

AllianceBernstein LP, Van Kampen Funds Inc., Invesco Ltd. and Putnam Investments have all announced changes to their target date portfolios that will enable managers to provide more active management.

In some cases, the funds now will allow managers to move in and out of different asset classes more quickly during market fluctuations. Others are adding funds to their target date portfolios that are meant to protect investors from market downturns.

These fund companies are not bit players-they are large and they have a lot of industry influence. They have discovered that their original premise of using strategic asset allocation did not work very well during the last downturn. Additionally, they may be concerned that piling more bonds into target date portfolios as investors age might not be a great idea in this interest rate environment.

Maybe it is something else entirely that is making them nervous. Whatever the reason, it is interesting to see that they have suddenly gotten religion, thrown strategic asset allocation overboard, and gone tactical.


On This Day Three Years Ago

March 1, 2010

On 3/1/2007, Dorsey Wright and our partners PowerShares rang the bell at the NYSE and The PowerShares DWA Technical Leaders Portfolio (PDP) began trading. In the three years since its inception, PDP has outperformed the S&P 500 by 0.54%. It is up 55.01% over the last twelve months, which is ahead of the S&P 500 by 4.76% over that time.

Click here for the fact sheet on PDP.


Weekly RS Recap

March 1, 2010

The table below shows the performance of a universe of mid and large cap U.S. equities, broken down by relative strength decile and quartile and then compared to the universe return. Those at the top of the ranks are those stocks which have the best intermediate-term relative strength. Relative strength strategies buy securities that have strong intermediate-term relative strength and hold them as long as they remain strong.

Last week’s performance (2/22/10 – 2/26/10) is as follows:

The top quartile percentile performed a little better than the universe last week.