| dc.description.abstract | With the arrival of an aging society, retirement pension planning becomes an important topic for many people. However, often times, people do not know how to make their choices due to their lack of sufficient investment experience and unfamiliarity with the financial instruments. As a result, they miss the golden opportunity for investment.
The main purpose of this study is to understand why the life-cycle fund and balanced fund are the preferred retirement fiscal strategies, by comparing the analyses between the global balanced fund and the life-cycle fund that have been domestically pre-approved and archived for future reference. In addition, a comparison was done between the target-date fund and the balanced fund, using a simulation method, to determine the differences between the two in terms of risk and reward, due to different portfolio allocations.
This study chose the annual rates of return for the MSCI World Index and the Barclays Capital Global Aggregate Bond Index to conduct a simulation analysis in order to speculate the portfolio rate of return over the past thirty-five years. The approach for the fund design was to first divide it into aggressive, stable and conservative portfolio types based on the investors’ risk appetite. They were then adjusted based on the target-date fund glide path, which in this case was set to a fixed-slope allocation method; while the balanced fund was to maintain a stocks and bonds fixed-ratio method of allocation.
The Sharpe Ratio and the starndard deviation were used to measure the performances of the target-date fund and the balanced fund. The results revealed that, the target-date fund allocation method performed better most of the time, and the risk of the portfolio can be lowered as the retirement age approaches. This particular feature also meets the objective of needing the asset to be more stable for numerous retirement investors. | en_US |