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Management of Portfolio Depletion Risk through Optimal Life Cycle Asset Allocation

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  • Peter A. Forsyth
  • Kenneth R. Vetzal
  • Graham Westmacott

Abstract

Members of defined contribution (DC) pension plans must take on additional responsibilities for their investments, compared to participants in defined benefit (DB) pension plans. The transition from DB to DC plans means that more employees are faced with these responsibilities. We explore the extent to which DC plan members can follow financial strategies that have a high chance of resulting in a retirement scenario that is fairly close to that provided by DB plans. Retirees in DC plans typically must fund spending from accumulated savings. This leads to the risk of depleting these savings, that is, portfolio depletion risk. We analyze the management of this risk through life cycle optimal dynamic asset allocation, including the accumulation and decumulation phases. We pose the asset allocation strategy as an optimal stochastic control problem. Several objective functions are tested and compared. We focus on the risk of portfolio depletion at the terminal date, using such measures as conditional value at risk (CVAR) and probability of ruin. A secondary consideration is the median terminal portfolio value. The control problem is solved using a Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman formulation, based on a parametric model of the financial market. Monte Carlo simulations that use the optimal controls are presented to evaluate the performance metrics. These simulations are based on both the parametric model and bootstrap resampling of 91 years of historical data. The resampling tests suggest that target-based approaches that seek to establish a safety margin of wealth at the end of the decumulation period appear to be superior to strategies that directly attempt to minimize risk measures such as the probability of portfolio depletion or CVAR. The target-based approaches result in a reasonably close approximation to the retirement spending available in a DB plan. There is a small risk of depleting the retiree’s funds, but there is also a good chance of accumulating a buffer that can be used to manage unplanned longevity risk or left as a bequest.

Suggested Citation

  • Peter A. Forsyth & Kenneth R. Vetzal & Graham Westmacott, 2019. "Management of Portfolio Depletion Risk through Optimal Life Cycle Asset Allocation," North American Actuarial Journal, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 23(3), pages 447-468, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:uaajxx:v:23:y:2019:i:3:p:447-468
    DOI: 10.1080/10920277.2019.1570469
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    Citations

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    Cited by:

    1. Peter A. Forsyth, 2020. "A Stochastic Control Approach to Defined Contribution Plan Decumulation: "The Nastiest, Hardest Problem in Finance"," Papers 2008.06598, arXiv.org.
    2. Li, Yuying & Forsyth, Peter A., 2019. "A data-driven neural network approach to optimal asset allocation for target based defined contribution pension plans," Insurance: Mathematics and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 86(C), pages 189-204.
    3. Hanwen Zhang & Duy-Minh Dang, 2023. "A monotone numerical integration method for mean-variance portfolio optimization under jump-diffusion models," Papers 2309.05977, arXiv.org.
    4. Wen Chen & Nicolas Langren'e, 2020. "Deep neural network for optimal retirement consumption in defined contribution pension system," Papers 2007.09911, arXiv.org, revised Jul 2020.
    5. Forsyth, Peter A., 2020. "Optimal dynamic asset allocation for DC plan accumulation/decumulation: Ambition-CVAR," Insurance: Mathematics and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 93(C), pages 230-245.
    6. Pieter M. van Staden & Peter A. Forsyth & Yuying Li, 2023. "A parsimonious neural network approach to solve portfolio optimization problems without using dynamic programming," Papers 2303.08968, arXiv.org.
    7. Wen Chen & Nicolas Langrené, 2020. "Deep neural network for optimal retirement consumption in defined contribution pension system [Réseau de neurones profond pour consommation à la retraite optimale en système de retraite à cotisatio," Working Papers hal-02909818, HAL.

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