All Stocks, All the Time?

All Stocks, All the Time? In this episode, Kate and Veljko look at new research finding that the optimal retirement portfolio allocation is all stocks, no bonds. Is the advice we have been hearing all along, to put a larger and larger slice of our portfolios into bonds as we age, just wrong? Kate and Veljko try to make sense of it all, measuring returns, quantifying risks, and digging out the hard facts.     Timeline: 00:00 All Stocks, All the Time? 06:07 Welcome to Questions in Finance 06:45 The Team, the Data, the Machinery 11:28 Stocks and Bonds 17:05 Returns and Accumulations 22:18 Risks and Drawdowns 24:06 Behavioral Effects and Panics 26:20 Time Horizons 34:04 International Stocks Over Bonds 36:22 The Death of the Lifecycle 57:11 All Stocks, All the Time, for Everyone 01:12:20 The (Un)Safe Withdrawal Rate 01:18:42 On Balance   Bibliography: Anarkulova, Aizhan, Scott Cederburg, and Michael S. O’Doherty. “Stocks for the long run? Evidence from a broad sample of developed markets.” Journal of Financial Economics 143, no. 1 (2022): 409-433. Anarkulova, Aizhan, Scott Cederburg, and Michael S. O’Doherty. “Beyond the status quo: a critical assessment of lifecycle investment advice.” SSRN Working Paper (2023). Anarkulova, Aizhan, Scott Cederburg, and Michael S. O'Doherty. “Long-Horizon Losses in Stocks, Bonds, and Bills.” SSRN Working Paper (2023). Anarkulova, Aizhan, Scott Cederburg, Michael S. O’Doherty, and Richard Sias. “The safe withdrawal rate: evidence from a broad sample of developed markets.” Journal of Pension Economics & Finance 24, no. 3 (2025): 464-500. Munson, Lee. Rigged Money: Beating Wall Street at Its Own Game. John Wiley & Sons, 2011. Bali, Turan G., K. Ozgur Demirtas, Haim Levy, and Avner Wolf. “Bonds versus stocks: Investors’ age and risk taking.” Journal of Monetary Economics 56, no. 6 (2009): 817-830. Payet, Stéphanie. “Does investing in equity markets bring better retirement income.” OECD Pensions Outlook 2024 (2024): 75.   Soundtrack: The soundtrack is based on "Walk on a Funky Street" by MondayHopes. Thanks for the music and keep up the good work! Use is under the Pixabay Content License.   Correction: After publishing, we received a note from Micheal O'Doherty, noting: "One minor point. The dataset doesn’t come from the (free) “World Bank’s Global Financial Development Database.” It starts from the (proprietary) Global Financial Database (Finaeon), and we did a LOT of data cleaning and supplementing from other sources to put everything together." Our apologies for the mistake!