Author: Victor

Kevin Mercadante has a great review of Financial Engines on the Investor Junkie site. Here’s the key points I took away:

Founded in 1996, Financial Engines is a retirement plan advisory service for employees of participating employer retirement plans (which many online advisors work outside of).

They provide management services and advice so that either they can manage your plan, or you can do it yourself but armed with their information and input.

The service is made available through your employer plan, which is to say that it’s offered as an additional benefit — or in this case, a benefit within a benefit.

A very few employers make the service available to their staffs free of charge, but the range is between 0.20% and 0.60% of the value of your retirement portfolio, with the average being “just below 0.40%”. Based on the average, the cost on a $100,000 401(k) plan would be just below $400 per year. This is the fee you will pay to Financial Engines while using their service. It does not include administrative fees paid to your account administrator, or transactions costs to trade and maintain securities and funds. As far as account minimums, there are none.

Services:

Analyze your retirement plan saving options

Consider expense ratios, sales loads, asset turnover, transaction costs, management style of individual fund investments, among other services

Provide you with a Progress Report showing your account balance, the potential value of your account when you retire, and the adjustments they’ve made to reflect your situation and market conditions

As you approach retirement, you get detailed Retirement Checkups with expert advisor representatives who can help you stay on track

Their Social Security Planner is a tool that can show you how to maximize your income from that source.

aka the father of modern portfolio theory

“Perhaps the most important job of a financial advisor is to get their clients in the right place on the efficient frontier in their portfolios,” he told me. “But their No. 2 job, a very close second, is to create portfolios that their clients are comfortable with. Advisors can create the best portfolios in the world, but they won’t really matter if the clients don’t stay in them.”

In other words, MPT and behavioral economics have to work together. And Moskowitz figured that out early…

“There was a big difference in my views about how and why to use mean variance analysis (that’s academic-speak for MPT) in my 1952 paper and in my ’59 paper. In the ’52 paper the only portfolio constraints I was concerned about were to avoid negative returns. But by 1959, I was concerned about [how investors would react to] the portfolio construction: For the comfort of the clients, we put constraints on ‘risky sounding stuff,’ such as junk bonds, etc. We knew that might dampen returns, but it was better than if they chicken out in a down market.”

From an interview with Bob Clark.

“Policy-Based Financial Planning: Decision Rules for a Changing World” by Dave Yeske, managing director, and Elisa Buie, CEO of Yeske Buie. Based on their 2011 paper, Yeske and Buie provided a six-step process for creating effective financial planning policies for each client:

1. Engage in the discovery process in which the financial planner learns about the client’s personal history, values, beliefs, goals and resources.
2. Identify planning areas and best practices required by this client.
3. Combine goals with best practices to create a proposed policy.
4. Test the policy: Is this a good policy?
5. Test-drive the policy with the client and listen to their feedback.
6. Conduct periodic reviews and updates checking for changing circumstances.

“Advising the Behavioral Investor: Lessons from the Real World” by Gregg Fisher, founder of Gerstein Fisher. “While he cited common investor mistakes such as failing to rebalance, chasing yield and underestimating the impact of inflation, he also explored the less talked about failure to consider a client’s income stream as an asset; one that requires at least as much—if not more—offsetting diversification than their other holdings.”

“His unconventional approach is also evident in the considerable body of research he cited debunking the advantage of dollar-cost averaging versus lump-sum investments. Fisher suggested that “sub-optimal” investment strategies can also be the best investment strategies. “Instead of debating [whether MPT or behavioral finance strategies are better], an investment advisor should borrow from both. The result will be an investment portfolio and strategy that may be suboptimal from an MPT standpoint, but may be the right approach for the investors. In other words, sometimes ‘the right portfolio’ isn’t the right portfolio.”

He used an example that shows how “based on information about a client, as well as experience with other clients in similar situations, an advisor might conclude that this client would panic and sell equities at a major loss at the market bottom. As a financial advisor, the best case may be to recommend that this investor pay off their mortgage and student loans before investing in risky assets. Again, no financial optimizer would recommend this strategy.”

“Post-Crisis Investor Behavior: Experience Matters,” by Joseph Rizzi, president of Macro Strategies LLC. “The financial crisis of 2008-2009 with its 50% drop in stock market value is seared into the collective investor memory—especially generation Y investors,” he wrote. “[Younger] investors are more focused on reacting to macro developments than asset fundamentals. The shift from ‘return on capital’ to ‘return of capital’ underlies the move away from equities into perceived lower risk fixed income by certain investor groups.”

See also this interview with Harry Markowitz

* I haven’t read this book yet. I’m summarizing this book review. I do this so when I want to know more about this topic and find this post I know which book I should go to for more.