stocks

Why age based asset allocation is mostly wrong

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I have often heard a lot of financial planners advise an asset allocation strategy based on the age of the investor – something on the lines of invest 100 less your age into equity or similar. While the broad logic of this strategy is that with increasing age, the capacity of an individual to earn himself out of a market crash reduces, purely age based asset allocation might, like many other things in finance and investing, be the right answer to the wrong question.

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A student who has taken an education loan or a young married person saving for the down payment of a house can hardly justify investing 80% of his savings into equity, while a middle aged double income couple with their mortgage paid off or a retired millionaire with 20 more years of life would be foolish to invest majority of their net worth in fixed income. In fact, it would be risky for the youngster to put 80% of his savings into equity if he gets caught in a market crash when he needs the money for his house; and equally risky for the retired old man to depend on his fixed deposits to face 20 years of inflation.

I have found that asset allocation percentages need to be an output determined by life circumstances, net worth, current income, overall risk tolerance and age. Age can be a good determinant of some of the above, but it is too simplistic to assume that it is the only one. In many cases, it is not – and hence, it turns out that portfolios are more conservative or riskier than they should be. Historical data suggests that the possibility of losing money in equities over a 10 year period is quite low. Hence the equity percentage of the portfolio must largely depend on the ability of the individual to, more or less, forget his money and ride out a period of 10 years with no need for the money put in equity (and perhaps, put more into equity, if required during crashes). Now this ability is something that depends on factors like risk tolerance, current income, net worth, temperament and life circumstances, of which age is just one determinant.

The more you have of this ability, the more should your asset allocation be comfortably tilted towards equity. And age has, perhaps, little but not much to do with it.

The Financial and Psychological Benefits of Rebalancing

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I have always felt that individual investors (or perhaps any investor to some extent for that matter) have never got a complete handle of the decision on when to sell. Traders or speculators mostly have a fixed target for profit or stop-loss, but investors never seem to enter a stock with a clear exit goal.

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Rebalancing as a strategy might provide answers to solve this quandary – more than anything else for the individual investor. At a portfolio level, it provides you with a clear answer on when to sell, and, if required, it can be translated and implemented at an individual stock level also by more mature individual investors. Setting asset allocation limits at various levels in a portfolio can provide you with clear triggers on when to sell. So then, you stop asking yourself questions like – should I sell stock A at this price or wait for some time – questions which have no clear answers anyway. On the other hand, that answer is provided at an overall portfolio level, based on allocation limits.

For example, to provide a complex set of rebalancing rules, consider the following: If you determine that equity will account for 60% of my portfolio, and within that, large cap stocks will account for 50% of the holdings, and then no industry will account for more than 25% and no stock more than 10%, then it becomes easier to take decisions on what and how much to sell when these allocation percentages go out of whack. And if you are not a direct stock investor, but take your exposure through mutual funds, it gets much easier than the above scenario, assuming that your fund manager is dealing with the rest. Therefore, ‘I bought stock A at X, should I sell it now at this price Y’ becomes a wrong and somewhat irrelevant question, and thankfully so.

Of course, rebalancing is not a strategy that guarantees the highest returns. In certain cases, you may end up selling your winners, which in hindsight may not feel great. But for individual investors, who may have no particular reason to feel a sense of conviction about a specific stock, it provides a good way to reduce or manage risk. I do not think at a mathematical level, rebalancing has a very high impact on returns, but it sure reduces risk of excessive falls and locks in some of the profits. And if done correctly, it will also ensure that you buy equity at a time when every one is running away from it – in which case rebalancing affects your long term returns too.

An important effect of this strategy might well also be at a mental or psychological level – because an individual investor feels he is in control and has been smart to book profits when his portfolio grows and to buy stocks when they were low in price.

Therefore, less for returns, more for managing risk, and most importantly for the psychological advantage of getting emotion out of buy/sell decisions, rebalancing is a crucial strategy for portfolio management for individual investors.

Is direct stock investing worth it or should mutual funds do?

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Assuming that I want to “invest” in the stock market, and not “trade” or “speculate”, getting average market returns is a no-brainer. I just need to buy an open-ended index fund or an exchange traded index fund, and I am done. At the lowest cost, I am guaranteed returns that the market index will give – day on day, month on month, year on year.

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Why, then, should I be even interested in investing in actively managed mutual funds? There can be only a few reasons for that. First – they give returns better than the index after deducing costs.  Second – I want an exposure to companies outside the index in a specific market cap or sector or style that I am bullish about. So it may make sense to supplement my index fund holdings by some actively managed funds that suit these requirements.

After that, why should I directly invest in stocks? Is it really worth the time and effort? There are few reasons when it may make sense. First – I am a better investor and can beat markets consistently. Easier said than done, but if that is the case, there is no reason I need to invest through the fund route. It is likely to take sufficient time and effort, but if indeed one can beat the index, why depend on mutual funds? Second – I want to invest in some businesses that are either small or in under-researched sectors that funds are not allowed to, or not able to invest in. There is a section of the market that institutions are not interested in. An individual investor who understands those businesses and has conviction on a particular company, has an advantage by investing directly. Third – this is perhaps due to the structural constraints of mutual funds. Due to the inherent requirement of funds to keep beating the index, some great businesses cannot be held by funds for long periods of time. For example, a mid-cap fund has identified a great mid-cap company, but once it becomes successful and actually becomes large-cap, the fund has to sell it. Or, during a market crash, a fund has to sell some companies to honor redemptions – so a buy and hold is not possible, even in case of great businesses.

In such scenarios, it may be worth it for individual investors to invest directly in stocks instead of the mutual fund route. But as index returns are easy to get, one has to be sure that these additional investments will actually help better portfolio returns rather than dilute them. Therefore, overall – allotting majority of your equity allocation to mutual funds (index or active based on performance) might be a prudent strategy for individual investors. Investments through direct stock holding can be a small part of your equity allocation – only in situations where there are valid reasons for the same.

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