Are target-date funds the answer?

Target-date funds

“Target-date funds” are currently the rage in the finance world. The term refers to a mutual fund that targets a given retirement date, and then steadily shifts the allocation of assets from, say, a 80%/20% mix of stocks and bonds at the start to, say, a 30%/70% mix as the target date approaches.

Vanguard Group, which manages over USD$5 trillion in assets, much of it in employer-offered defined contribution retirement plans, reports that participation in its target date offerings have grown explosively in the past few years. In 2005, when Vanguard started offering target-date funds, only a few

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July 21st, 2018 | Category: Essays | Comments are closed

Are economics and finance “lost in math”?

Is physics “lost in math”?

In a provocative new book, Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, quantum physicist Sabine Hossenfelder argues that the scientific world in general, and the field of physics in particular, has repeatedly clung to notions that have been rejected by experimental evidence, or has pursued theories far beyond what can be tested by experimentation, mainly because these theories and the mathematics behind them were judged “too beautiful not to be true.” Examples cited by Hossenfelder include:

Supersymmetry. Supersymmetry, the notion that each particle has a “superpartner,” was originally proposed in the 1970s, and

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July 6th, 2018 | Category: Essays | Comments are closed