April 2020 updates + investment strategy for this period

Hi friends, Wow. Just wow, it was definitely a blood bath the previous week. I am currently writing on the 4th week of march. But in the 2nd and 3rd week of the month, I experienced quite a big loss in my investment. It was an exciting experience. I was elated when the flash drop occur and the circuit breaker happened in the US market. So, here are my strategy for this period of extremely turbulence...

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Active management allows for better performance in market downturns?

Hi friends, One of the counter-arguments brought-forth by active management believers would be that they can utilise some other instruments (bonds, derivatives, or even cash) in a market downturn to achieve better performance in a market downturn (like the one that we are having now). Thus, I will...

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Research on the validity of the 4% Rule

Hi friends, These are the links to the papers and articles that I have referenced in this post: 1. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228707593_Sustainable_withdrawal_rates_from_your_retirement_portfolio 2. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/50211311_Sustainable_withdrawal_rates_of_retirees_Is_the_recent_economic_crisis_a_cause_for_concern 3. https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadepfau/2018/01/16/the-trinity-study-and-portfolio-success-rates-updated-to-2018/#73f347216860 For...

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Conclusion of the study on funds and their indexes for 15 years (IV)

Hi friends, Thank you for reading so far into my 4 part series. The objective of this part is to give you the key takeaways from the paper. This is especially important for those of you that cannot look at the data presented in the previous posts and just want the main point. Here I go: 1. Majority of funds would not perform as well as the market index as the time horizon increases. 2. Bigger fund...

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Comparison of funds and their indexes in international/global market across different caps for 15 years (III)

Hi friends, I would like to thank you for still reading through this dry and technical series. I hope that you have learnt a lot from my second post. This is the third post and we shall look at the performance of the International and Global market. Do note that in the paper, global funds/indexes would include US stocks and international funds/indexes would not include US stocks. The paper can also...

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Comparison of funds and their indexes in the US market across different caps for 15 years (II)

Hi friends, This is the second part of my four-part series on presenting to you the results of active-managed funds and passive funds. I will also be telling you what these data would mean in your personal finance. However, there is still a need to explain some of the terms in the paper such that you may fully understand the significance of the results. So these are the things that you need to take...

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Reading a paper comparing the performances of actively managed funds and index funds (Part I)

Hi friends, I was encouraged to see so many of us are interested in the Monte Carlo simulations of the different portfolios using market indexes. I have also received requests from readers to talk about other financial topics (Don’t worry, I am working on those at the moment. There is just too much to write about and I want to make sure that the stuff I write are as factually correct as possible)....

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New Skills: Monte Carlo Simulation

Hi Friends, I have recently learned about monte carlo simulations in excel. For those that are not so sure, monte carlo is essentially a simulation that you can run a lot of times to get the probability distributions of the process that you are about to take. Immediately, I thought of simulating the distributions of returns for different portfolios and for different numbers of years. So here are...

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