IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/diw/diwwpp/dp1324.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Stock Investments for Old-Age: Less Return, More Risk, and Unexpected Timing

Author

Listed:
  • Dirk Ulbricht

Abstract

Returns merely based on one purchasing price of an asset are uninformative for people regularly contributing to their old-age provision. Here, each purchase has an influence on the outcome. Still, they are commonly used in finance literature, giving an overly optimistic view of expected long-term stock market returns and risks. Moreover, around business cycle turning points when volatility is high, these differences are accentuated so that the timing of market entries and exists differ substantially. This article compares risk and returns for regular and lump-sum investors for all possible intervals of investments in the Dow Jones Industrial Average ranging from one to 480 months from January 1934 to April 2013. Moreover, the optimal timing for the two types of investors in the run-up to business cycle turning points are contrasted. Lump-sum returns for forty year-horizons overstate regular contributors yields by 1.4 percentage points implying a forty percent higher terminal value. The Sharpe ratio of lump-sum investments is about 260 percent higher than for regular contributors, and the risk of negative returns disappears for horizons that are six years shorter. Increasing contributions deteriorate risk and returns. While lump-sum investors have eight months more time to switch to riskless assets before a contraction, regular contributors may return five months earlier to the stock market than lump-sum investors.

Suggested Citation

  • 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.
  • Handle: RePEc:diw:diwwpp:dp1324
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.426766.de/dp1324.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Steven Vanduffel & Ales Ahcan & Luc Henrard & Mateusz Maj, 2012. "An Explicit Option-Based Strategy That Outperforms Dollar Cost Averaging," International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Finance (IJTAF), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 15(02), pages 1-19.
    2. Michael Brennan & Feifei Li & Walter Torous, 2005. "Dollar Cost Averaging," Review of Finance, Springer, vol. 9(4), pages 509-535, December.
    3. 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.
    4. 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.
    5. Malliaris, A.G. & Malliaris, Mary E., 2008. "Investment principles for individual retirement accounts," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 32(3), pages 393-404, March.
    6. Michael DeStefano, 2004. "Stock Returns and the Business Cycle," The Financial Review, Eastern Finance Association, vol. 39(4), pages 527-547, November.
    7. Michael J. Brennan & Feifei Li & Walter N. Torous, 2005. "Dollar Cost Averaging," Review of Finance, European Finance Association, vol. 9(4), pages 509-535.
    8. Ilia D. Dichev, 2007. "What Are Stock Investors’ Actual Historical Returns? Evidence from Dollar-Weighted Returns," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 97(1), pages 386-401, March.
    9. Ronald J. Balvers & Douglas W. Mitchell, 1997. "Autocorrelated Returns and Optimal Intertemporal Portfolio Choice," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 43(11), pages 1537-1551, November.
    10. Fama, Eugene F. & French, Kenneth R., 1989. "Business conditions and expected returns on stocks and bonds," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 25(1), pages 23-49, November.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    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. Dirk Ulbricht, 2014. "John Doe's Old-Age Provision: Dollar Cost Averaging and Time Diversification," Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin 1376, DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research.
    2. 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.
    3. 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.
    4. Kapalczynski, Anna & Lien, Donald, 2021. "Effectiveness of Augmented Dollar-Cost Averaging," The North American Journal of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 56(C).
    5. Xuejun Jin & Hongze Li & Bin Yu, 2023. "The day‐of‐the‐month effect and the performance of the dollar cost averaging strategy: Evidence from China," Accounting and Finance, Accounting and Finance Association of Australia and New Zealand, vol. 63(S1), pages 797-815, April.
    6. Alexander Kurov, 2012. "What determines the stock market's reaction to monetary policy statements?," Review of Financial Economics, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 21(4), pages 175-187, November.
    7. Ewald, Christian-Oliver & Menkens, Olaf & Hung Marten Ting, Sai, 2013. "Asian and Australian options: A common perspective," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 37(5), pages 1001-1018.
    8. Dieci, Roberto & Schmitt, Noemi & Westerhoff, Frank, 2018. "Interactions between stock, bond and housing markets," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 91(C), pages 43-70.
    9. Zhang, Yuzhao, 2014. "Contrarian flows, consumption and expected stock returns," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 42(C), pages 101-111.
    10. 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.
    11. Peter Heinrich & Gerhard Schwabe, 2018. "Facilitating Informed Decision-Making in Financial Service Encounters," Business & Information Systems Engineering: The International Journal of WIRTSCHAFTSINFORMATIK, Springer;Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V. (GI), vol. 60(4), pages 317-329, August.
    12. Jezek, M., 2009. "Passive Investors, Active Traders and Strategic Delegation of Price Discovery," Cambridge Working Papers in Economics 0951, Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge.
    13. Chalmers, John & Kaul, Aditya & Phillips, Blake, 2013. "The wisdom of crowds: Mutual fund investors’ aggregate asset allocation decisions," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 37(9), pages 3318-3333.
    14. Michele Bisceglia & Paola Zola, 2018. "Dollar-Cost Averaging with Yearly and Biyearly Installments," Journal of Applied Management and Investments, Department of Business Administration and Corporate Security, International Humanitarian University, vol. 7(1), pages 1-14, February.
    15. 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.
    16. John G Powell & Sirimon Treepongkaruna, 2012. "Recession fears as self-fulfilling prophecies? Influence on stock returns and output," Australian Journal of Management, Australian School of Business, vol. 37(2), pages 231-260, August.
    17. Lichao Cheng & Yi Jin & Zhixiong Zeng, 2011. "Asset Prices, Monetary Policy, and Aggregate Fluctuations: An Empirical Investigation," Monash Economics Working Papers 13-11, Monash University, Department of Economics.
    18. Cheng, Lichao & Jin, Yi, 2013. "Asset prices, monetary policy, and aggregate fluctuations: An empirical investigation," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 119(1), pages 24-27.
    19. Alex Ilek & Tanya Suchoy & Nir Klein, 2006. "Estimating the premium implicit in the yields of Treasury Bills," Israel Economic Review, Bank of Israel, vol. 4(2), pages 53-83.
    20. Lepori, Gabriele M., 2015. "Investor mood and demand for stocks: Evidence from popular TV series finales," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 48(C), pages 33-47.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Retirement Accounts; Risk and Return; Business Cycle; Investment Management; Dollar-Cost Averaging;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G11 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Portfolio Choice; Investment Decisions
    • G10 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - General (includes Measurement and Data)
    • E44 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Money and Interest Rates - - - Financial Markets and the Macroeconomy

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    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:diw:diwwpp:dp1324. 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: Bibliothek (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/diwbede.html .

    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.