Welcome to The Retired Investor
Invest Wisely…Get an Informed Second Opinion to Avoid Large Losses
We also publish a free weekly Substack newsletter: New Global Macro Evidence and Forecasts.
You can subscribe here.
As shown in the chart below, the challenges you face when investing after retirement are much more complex than those you face before you retire. That's why decumulation has been called "the nastiest, hardest problem in finance."
Index Investor LLC relaunched the Retired Investor to help you logically think through these questions, manage your risk, and reduce your uncertainty and anxiety.
Since 1997, our purpose at Index Investor LLC has been to help investors, corporate, and government leaders better anticipate, more accurately assess, and adapt in time to emerging threats.
For Retired Investors, this means providing strategic risk intelligence and early warning of potentially large losses that can ruin their life plans.
Despite this, warnings to investors about downside risks are still all-too-rare. As the legendary investor Jeremy Grantham has written, while this is frustrating it is not surprising:
"The combination of timing uncertainty and rapidly accelerating regret on the part of clients means that the career and business risk of fighting bubbles is too great for large commercial enterprises…
"Their best policy is clear and simple: always be extremely bullish. It is good for business and intellectually undemanding. It is appealing to most investors who much prefer optimism to realistic appraisal, as witnessed so vividly with COVID. And when it all ends, you will as a persistent bull have overwhelming company.
"This is why you have always had bullish advice in bubbles and always will."
Forecasting is the key to superior investment results, and especially to avoiding large losses that can ruin a retirement plan.
Every month, Retired Investor provides subscribers with insights about the evolving dynamics of the global macro system, and early warning of emerging threats that lie beyond the detection horizon and analytical capabilities of quantitative algorithmic methods. We translate our insights into probability forecasts for different macro regimes, and use them to adjust our model portfolio's asset allocation.
Accurate foresight comes not just from good forecasting skills, but also from asking the right questions. Arguably, the second is more difficult.
Compared to new quantitative data, new qualitative data diffuses more slowly across market participants, and is only gradually incorporated into asset prices.
This time delay, plus the accuracy of their mental models and forecasts, enables astute investors to avoid large losses by taking action before the market's dominant narrative changes.
To achieve this goal, we use a method called Multipath Analysis, in which we collect and synthesize high value information (threat indicators and surprises) in the areas of technology, health and disease, energy and the environment, the economy, national security, society, politics, and financial markets.
Their complex interaction over time cause the effects we later observe in the form of market narratives and investor beliefs, from which emerge asset class valuations and returns.
This approach enables us to ask the right questions, accurately forecast their answers, and synthesize their implications for subscribers in time to provide timely warning of emerging downside threats.
An investor's predictive accuracy can be further increased by combining forecasts from multiple sources that are based on different methods and/or information. This is one of the reasons investors subscribe to our research publications — to get a well informed second (or third) opinion.
For 23 years, we've made sense of global macro uncertainties, and warned subscribers in advance of the 2008, 2000 and 2020 financial crises, enabling them to avoid portfolio losses and the painful regrets they would have caused.
WHAT OUR SUBSCRIBERS SAY:
"I am delighted to get your analysis. We get everything from Wall Street, and they all seem to be saying the same thing. Your take is greatly appreciated."
"Your research is unique. There's nothing else like this out there."
"Really enjoy reading your work. It is one of the most independent views I see."
"Your team’s economic, investment and geo-political analysis is always in-depth and thought provoking and the forecasts are persuasive."
For only $149/year (or $14.95/month), here's what you'll get in each quarterly issue of the Retired Investor:
(1) Each week we publish significant new macro evidence and its impact on our forecast on Substack. You can sign up for these free emails at newmacroevidence.substack.com.
(2) Narrative forecasts and quantitative probability estimates for macro system and financial market regime changes over the next 12 and 36 months.
(3) Estimated asset class over/under valuations and updated market stress indicators (e.g., levels of uncertainty, herding, liquidity, and credit risk.
(4) Actionable Insights: The implications of our forecasts for changes in portfolio asset allocation.
(5) A feature article providing an in-depth analysis of either a key macro-uncertainty (e.g., how close the system is to one or more critical thresholds) or an aspect of making good investment decisions in the face of complexity and uncertainty.
(6) In between monthly publications, we publish flash updates — via Substack, on our LinkedIn page, via email, and via our Twitter @indexllc — if and when we obtain high value information that results in a substantial change to a forecast probability.
You can download a free sample copy of a recent issue to get a better understanding of what we provide subscribers each month.
You can also learn more about our forecasting methodology here.
Click the MENU Button above to browse the free section of this site, which contains a wealth of helpful information, including our core investment beliefs, an overview of retired investing, how to quantify your portfolio goals, and reviews of asset allocation, portfolio construction, and risk management.
You can also see the compound real returns our 2005 Retired Investor target real return portfolios achieved between 2005 and 2020. These are available in six functional currencies: Australian Dollars (AUD), Canadian Dollars (CAD), Euro (EUR), Swiss Francs (CHF), UK Pounds (GBP) and US Dollars (USD). The portfolio allocations included only broad asset class index products.
In our free Research Library you can learn more about critical uncertainties that drive medium and long-term asset class valuations, including technological, environmental, economic, national security, social, demographic, political, and financial market trends and uncertainties, as well as potential "grey swan" wildcards like infectious disease, cyber, and large-scale electromagnetic events.
This knowledge helps to hone your own instincts for recognizing surprising new information that could indicate large losses lie ahead.
We originally published Retired Investor from 2004 to 2011. All our back issues are here.
We also publish The Index Investor, which provides detailed global macro research and asset allocation analysis.
The main difference between Retired Investor and Index Investor is that the latter costs more, but comes with some more advanced analyses, as well as access to our Evidence Files, where we continuously accumulate and synthesize high value information (threat indicators and surprises) in the areas of technology, health and disease, energy and the environment, the economy, national security, society, politics, and financial markets. Our Evidence Files are organized both chronologically and by subject.
More information about the history of Index Investor and Retired Investor can be found here.
Index Investor LLC is affiliated with Britten Coyne Partners, which provides strategic risk related consulting services to management teams and boards, and the Strategic Risk Institute LLC, which provides online and in-person education offerings leading to a Certificate in Strategic Risk Governance and Management.
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