Investing

Laurence Kotlikoff is a Professor of Economics and Boston University. Professor Kotlikoff is one of the nation’s leading experts on fiscal policy, national saving and personal finance. 

Professor Kotlikoff is the author or co-author of 15 books and he publishes extensively in newspapers, magazines and blogs on issues of personal finance, financial reform, taxes,...

Maddy Dychtwald is a nationally recognized author, co-founder of Age Wave, and a leading expert on the changing demographic trends shaping the marketplace, the workplace and our lives.

Having spent twenty-five years exploring and forecasting lifestyle, marketing and retirement implications of the age wave, she has recently emerged as a renowned authority on the economic ascent of women, including its impact on the financial services industry.

Age Wave’s breakthrough research on women and money includes the recent research study A New Era of Women and...

In a Fortune article titled “Why Stocks Beat Gold and Bonds,” Warren Buffett provides a glimpse of his upcoming shareholder letter.

While Buffett’s advice is perfect for investors who have a long-term perspective, anyone near or in retirement may want to think twice about acting on the prescription.

The core of Buffett’s advice is as follows:

• Investing is fundamentally about the transfer of purchasing power with the “reasoned expectation” of that current transfer resulting in greater purchasing power in the future.
• Given this focus on the preservation and ideally growth of purchasing power, investors should care less about any price
...

The world is filled with investing indexes and benchmarks, and all professional investment managers measure their results relative to some type of performance standard such as the S&P 500.

On the retirement income front, though, similar gauges of performance are virtually non-existent.  The lack of a baseline...

Is there a sense of “swimming upstream” when trying to propagate goal-based investing--as described in your new book Risk Less and Prosper--among existing financial advisors? Conventional practices and economic incentives are so heavily skewed towards modern portfolio theory and growing assets under management. 

Bodie and Taqqu:  We read your question as a riff on what it would take to move mainstream personal investing toward a more customer-centric, goal based model.  You’ve marked some ways that we may be swimming against the tide—and against the interests of today’s investment industry.

But tides turn. It’s...