IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/ejores/v207y2010i1p508-513.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Should you stop investing in a sinking fund when it is sinking?

Author

Listed:
  • Mingers, John
  • Parker, Kim T.

Abstract

Many people invest regularly in sinking funds that track stock market indices. When stock markets themselves sink significantly, as in the current credit crunch, investors face a decision as to whether they should continue paying into a falling fund, or switch payment to a risk-free deposit account until the market recovers. Most financial advice is to keep investing on the grounds that as the unit price falls more units can be purchased and that this is ultimately beneficial (dollar-cost averaging, DCA) However, most academic studies show that DCA is sub-optimal, at least to a lump sum strategy. In this paper we consider a specific, tax-free fund - the Individual Savings Account (ISA). We demonstrate, both analytically and numerically, that in a situation of perfect information a stop and restart policy can beat DCA. From these results we test some heuristics that could be used by an everyday investor under real-world conditions of uncertainty and volatility.

Suggested Citation

  • Mingers, John & Parker, Kim T., 2010. "Should you stop investing in a sinking fund when it is sinking?," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 207(1), pages 508-513, November.
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:ejores:v:207:y:2010:i:1:p:508-513
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377-2217(10)00313-9
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Summers, Lawrence H, 1986. "Does the Stock Market Rationally Reflect Fundamental Values?," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 41(3), pages 591-601, July.
    2. Michael Brennan & Feifei Li & Walter Torous, 2005. "Dollar Cost Averaging," Review of Finance, Springer, vol. 9(4), pages 509-535, December.
    3. De Bondt, Werner F M & Thaler, Richard, 1985. "Does the Stock Market Overreact?," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 40(3), pages 793-805, July.
    4. Ballestero, E. & Gunther, M. & Pla-Santamaria, D. & Stummer, C., 2007. "Portfolio selection under strict uncertainty: A multi-criteria methodology and its application to the Frankfurt and Vienna Stock Exchanges," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 181(3), pages 1476-1487, September.
    5. Barro, Diana & Canestrelli, Elio, 2005. "Dynamic portfolio optimization: Time decomposition using the Maximum Principle with a scenario approach," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 163(1), pages 217-229, May.
    6. Constantinides, George M., 1979. "A Note on the Suboptimality of Dollar-Cost Averaging as an Investment Policy," Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 14(2), pages 443-450, June.
    7. Karyl Leggio & Donald Lien, 2003. "An empirical examination of the effectiveness of dollar-cost averaging using downside risk performance measures," Journal of Economics and Finance, Springer;Academy of Economics and Finance, vol. 27(2), pages 211-223, June.
    8. Michael J. Brennan & Feifei Li & Walter N. Torous, 2005. "Dollar Cost Averaging," Review of Finance, European Finance Association, vol. 9(4), pages 509-535.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Zhou, Yuzhou & Zhai, Qiaozhu & Yuan, Wei & Wu, Jiang, 2021. "Capacity expansion planning for wind power and energy storage considering hourly robust transmission constrained unit commitment," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 302(C).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Kirkby, J. Lars & Mitra, Sovan & Nguyen, Duy, 2020. "An analysis of dollar cost averaging and market timing investment strategies," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 286(3), pages 1168-1186.
    2. Dirk Ulbricht, 2013. "Stock Investments for Old-Age: Less Return, More Risk, and Unexpected Timing," Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin 1324, DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research.
    3. Kapalczynski, Anna & Lien, Donald, 2021. "Effectiveness of Augmented Dollar-Cost Averaging," The North American Journal of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 56(C).
    4. Erol Akçay & David Hirshleifer, 2021. "Social finance as cultural evolution, transmission bias, and market dynamics," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 118(26), pages 2015568118-, June.
    5. Lo, Andrew W & MacKinlay, A Craig, 1990. "When Are Contrarian Profits Due to Stock Market Overreaction?," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 3(2), pages 175-205.
    6. Douglas W. Blackburn & Nusret Cakici, 2020. "Tangible and intangible information in emerging markets," Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting, Springer, vol. 54(4), pages 1509-1527, May.
    7. Cornell, Bradford, 2000. "Valuing Intel: A Strange Tale of Analysts and Announcements," University of California at Los Angeles, Anderson Graduate School of Management qt4dm1h6qh, Anderson Graduate School of Management, UCLA.
    8. Gunaratne, P. S. M. & Yonesawa, Y., 1997. "Return reversals in the Tokyo Stock Exchange: A test of stock market overreaction," Japan and the World Economy, Elsevier, vol. 9(3), pages 363-384, August.
    9. Eric Hillebrand, 2003. "The Effects of Japanese Foreign Exchange Intervention: GARCH Estimation and Change Point Detection," Departmental Working Papers 2003-10, Department of Economics, Louisiana State University.
    10. Spierdijk, Laura & Bikker, Jacob A. & van den Hoek, Pieter, 2012. "Mean reversion in international stock markets: An empirical analysis of the 20th century," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 31(2), pages 228-249.
    11. Chiang, Raymond & Davidson, Ian & Okunev, John, 1997. "Some further theoretical and empirical implications regarding the relationship between earnings, dividends and stock prices," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 21(1), pages 17-35, January.
    12. Serban, Alina F., 2010. "Combining mean reversion and momentum trading strategies in foreign exchange markets," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 34(11), pages 2720-2727, November.
    13. Surinder Singh Khurana & Parvinder Singh & Naresh Kumar Garg, 2024. "OG-CAT: A Novel Algorithmic Trading Alternative to Investment in Crypto Market," Computational Economics, Springer;Society for Computational Economics, vol. 63(5), pages 1735-1756, May.
    14. Robert D. Arnott & Jason C. Hsu & Jun Liu & Harry Markowitz, 2015. "Can Noise Create the Size and Value Effects?," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 61(11), pages 2569-2579, November.
    15. George A. Akerlof, 2003. "Behavioral Macroeconomics and Macroeconomic Behavior," The American Economist, Sage Publications, vol. 47(1), pages 25-47, March.
    16. Vidhan K. Goyal & Takeshi Yamada, 2004. "Asset Price Shocks, Financial Constraints, and Investment: Evidence from Japan," The Journal of Business, University of Chicago Press, vol. 77(1), pages 175-200, January.
    17. Y. Lemp'eri`ere & C. Deremble & P. Seager & M. Potters & J. P. Bouchaud, 2014. "Two centuries of trend following," Papers 1404.3274, arXiv.org.
    18. Adam Majewski & Stefano Ciliberti & Jean-Philippe Bouchaud, 2018. "Co-existence of Trend and Value in Financial Markets: Estimating an Extended Chiarella Model," Papers 1807.11751, arXiv.org.
    19. Cars Hommes & Florian Wagener, 2008. "Complex Evolutionary Systems in Behavioral Finance," Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers 08-054/1, Tinbergen Institute.
    20. Fatma SIALA GUERMEZI, & Amani BOUSSAADA, 2016. "The Weak Form Of Informational Efficiency: Case Of Tunisian Banking Sector," EcoForum, "Stefan cel Mare" University of Suceava, Romania, Faculty of Economics and Public Administration - Economy, Business Administration and Tourism Department., vol. 5(1), pages 1-1, January.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:ejores:v:207:y:2010:i:1:p:508-513. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/eor .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.