Wealth Management

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

I initially wrote this book as a textbook for a wealth management class with students who already had some basic knowledge of finance. But the vast portion of the material is suitable for a broader audience with no finance background. And while the book contains some finance theory and math, it is intended to be very practical, and you can skip most of the math with limited loss of the content.

The book is not a personal finance book for dummies. I am not going to tell you to pay off your credit card balance every month or that you should never borrow from a payday lender. I assume you already know that. But I will not go to the other extreme either, by reviewing, say, short selling (which you should stay away from) or the valuation of securities (which is a futile exercise for individuals not working on Wall Street).

It has taken me a long time to discover and digest the material in this book. I thought I was quite educated in financial matters when I got my PhD, but I was very wrong. I wish I had known the content in this book at an earlier stage of my career so that I could have made wiser financial decisions. In any event, I want to pass on the content to others who are in their early stages because the earlier you know the lessons in this book and adopt them, the better your financial health will be later. But even if you are already well into your career or close to retirement, you should benefit greatly.

Figure 1.1 provides a simplistic overview of some basic principles in this book. The surest path to wealth in the long run (beyond the obvious of saving as much as you can) is to (i) fully exploit retirement accounts and other tax-advantaged accounts and (ii) place most of the money in the stock market using low-fee exchange-traded funds and individual stocks. You should also supplement with investments in regular brokerage accounts (though these investments require some extra tax maneuvering) and basic insurance products, including health insurance and term life insurance, while you have dependents. In contrast, I argue that use of permanent life insurance products and annuities should be limited. Oh—the sharks represent anyone who wants a bite of your wealth, including insurance salespeople, financial advisers, and tax collectors, though this, of course, is an overdramatization.

Figure 1.1 Overview of some basic principles

The book helps you navigate the pitfalls and opportunities in the world of wealth management. I will also express my personal opinions in places. But I am not a lawyer, and you should seek legal advice if you encounter complex legal uncertainties and challenges.

You might also want to consult a financial adviser on occasion as a supplement to this book. There is an abundance of individuals who call themselves financial advisers and planners, so you should ensure that the adviser is a fiduciary, meaning that (s)he is obligated to act in your best interest.¹ You might even request a written confirmation that (s)he is a fiduciary before proceeding. A safe choice is a Registered Investment Adviser (RIA) because RIAs must act as fiduciaries and are registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) or state regulatory agencies. Furthermore, I recommend that you pay a flat or hourly rate for the services. I believe that advisers who earn commissions or trading fees have perverse incentives to recommend inappropriate products and excessive trading, and those who charge a fraction of clients’ assets under management (AUM) end up being more expensive for the clients than they should be. For example, five hours of service might cost you 5 hours × $200 = $1,000, whereas a 1 percent fee on a portfolio of half a million dollars amounts to 1% × $500,000 = $5,000 annually.

If you keep on reading, you will make better financial decisions and be less reliant on outside help. Both should enhance your financial resilience, and perhaps even happiness, in the long run.

¹ In 2020, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) adopted the Regulation Best Interest (Reg BI) for brokers and investment advisers. Reg BI is an improvement from the earlier suitability standard, requiring that advisers only recommend so-called suitable investments, that is, investments that suit the client’s goals and risk tolerance, even if they have high commissions. Yet, experts generally agree that Reg BI does not protect clients as well as the fiduciary standard. For example, if you sue your adviser for bad advice, a fiduciary adviser must prove that the advice was in your best interest, whereas as a nonfiduciary adviser can leave the burden of proof to you.

CHAPTER 2

Investment Returns and Investment Principles

As an individual investor, you have access to many different types of investments, ranging from education (which is an investment in your human capital) to shares in publicly traded companies (i.e., stocks). What matters for investors is the return over time from those investments. This chapter reviews the calculation and behavior of returns. The focus is on returns on investments in stocks and bonds, which form the basis for much of our wealth accumulation, while later chapters cover real estate and various insurance products.

The main objectives for this chapter are:

•Explore investment returns of stocks and bonds, including how returns behave across securities and time.

•Learn some basic investment principles based on the aforementioned exploration, including the benefits of:

Diversification across many securities; and

Investing in riskier securities for longer investment horizons.

Investment Returns

Figure 2.1 shows the calculation of the return on investment. This investment return can be highly uncertain, and we often refer to that uncertaintyas volatility and measure it with standard deviation. Importantly, most of the volatility stems from the first part of the investment return, that is, the capital gain. The second part, that is, the return from capital distributions, is much more stable and predictable in practice.

Figure 2.1 Calculation of investment return

Figure 2.2 The sources of returns for bonds and stocks

The relative magnitudes of the two sources of returns, capital gains and distributions, differ greatly across securities, as illustrated in Figure 2.2. Bonds get most of their return from distributions (i.e., interest payments), while stocks get most of their return from capital gains and only a modest return from distributions (i.e., dividends). Furthermore, the capital gains for bonds from issuance to maturity is set. Thus, bond returns are less volatile than stock returns. The next subsections discuss these issues in greater detail.

Bonds and Bond Returns

Bonds are debt securities issued by the federal government (Treasury bills and bonds), state and local governments (municipal bonds, or munis), and corporations. You can readily buy individual Treasury bills and bonds. However, the markets for individual munis and corporate bonds are rather illiquid, making purchases expensive, just like buying foreign currency from a street vendor. Thus, if you wish to invest in bonds, you are likely better off buying some mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) that specializes in bonds, such as Vanguard’s total bond market ETF (with ticker symbol BND).

Figure 2.3 Bond prices over time

Most bonds pay periodic interest payments, also called coupons, typically every 6 or 12 months. The primary return from buying bonds stems from these coupon payments. However, it is also possible for an investor who does not hold a bond from issuance to maturity to experience considerable capital gain or loss because bond prices fluctuate over time.

This book will not cover bond valuation because there is no need for most individual investors to have that skill. Yet it is useful to know how bonds change in value between issuance and maturity.

Figure 2.3 shows the price over time for two hypothetical bonds with the common par value of $1,000.¹ There are several noteworthy aspects:

1. The prices around the issuance are very close to the bond’s par value of $1,000. ²

2. The prices fluctuate after the issue because either the interest rates in the market change or the credit risk of the issuer changes. In the graph, the bond prices increased in the early life of both bonds, meaning that either the general interest rates or the credit risk of the issuer decreased. However, the bond price of one of the bonds decreased leading up to the middle of its life because of an increase in interest rates or credit risk.

3. As the bonds mature, the price fluctuations subside, and the price approaches $1,000, right where it started. This shows that an investor who buys the bonds upon issuance and holds them to maturity experiences no price gain or loss, and the entire investment return comes as coupon payments.

There are also some bonds that do not pay coupons, so-called zero-coupon bonds. Most prominent of these are Treasury bills, which have such short maturity (from three months to a year) that coupons do not make sense. Because they lack coupons, they will be trading at a discount relative to their par value, which is why they are called discount bonds (along with other bonds that trade at a discount relative to their par value). Figure 2.4 shows a typical price path for a zero-coupon bond, starting well below the par value and slowly increasing toward the par value as it matures.

Zero-coupon bonds are unique in that they expect to yield their entire return in the form of capital gain. However, this capital gain from the issuance to maturity is perfectly predictable (though the exact path is not). Furthermore, investors must report a pro-rated portion as interest for tax purposes. That means that even zero-coupon bonds are deemed to have most of their return as coupons.

Figure 2.4 Zero-coupon bond prices over time

The key takeaway then is that, at least for tax purposes, bonds get most of their return from coupon payments, while the capital gains and losses tend to be moderate. A later chapter discusses how the coupons and capital gains are taxed.

Stocks and Stock Returns

Stocks (shares) represent ownership in a company. As a shareholder, you have certain rights, including the right to vote on who will represent you on the board of directors and the right to partake in any cash distributions to shareholders, that is, dividends. Thus, the investment return from holding a stock comes from capital gain (or loss) and the dividend yield, that is, the annual dividend scaled by the stock price. Both the expected capital gain and the dividend yield vary substantially across individual stocks and sectors. For example, stocks in high-tech companies tend not to pay any dividends at all, but they are expected to produce high capital gain. Conversely, companies in mature and stable industries, for example, utilities, tend to pay large dividends and are expected to produce modest capital gain.

In the aggregate, the capital gain of publicly traded companies in the United States far exceeds the dividend yield. For example, the average dividend yield for S&P 500 companies hovers around 2 percent (and it is less for smaller companies), whereas the capital gain has historically been four to five times greater. Figure 2.5 shows the possible evolution of stock prices over time if we assume either no dividends or a modest dividend paid on the days denoted on the X-axis. You can see that (i) the prices tend to drift upward, (ii) the price gain is stronger when there is no dividend, and (iii) the volatility of returns is fairly constant over time, though it might decrease very slowly as the companies get sufficiently large and mature.

Figure 2.5 Stock prices over time

Importantly, dividends have no effect on the total investment return in this simple framework, in that firms with a higher dividend yield have a correspondingly lower capital gain. That does not mean that dividends are irrelevant for investors; capital gains and dividends are taxed differently, which affects our optimal choice of dividend-paying versus nondividend-paying stocks.³ I will return to this in the next chapter.

The Historical Record

It is informative to examine the historical record of bonds and stocks to get a sense of their levels and volatilities of returns. Figure 2.6 shows what would have happened over time to a one-dollar investment in 1927 in either Treasury bills, Treasury bonds, corporate bonds with a bond rating of Baa (i.e., corporate bonds with modest credit risk), or S&P 500 stocks. The depicted returns capture both capital gains (losses) and cash distributions. The y-axis is logarithmic so that you can better see the action throughout the entire period; otherwise, you would barely be able to see the price movements in the earlier period.

Figure 2.6 The historical record of stocks and bonds

What can we learn from the graph? The investment in Treasury bills is the tortoise in the graph, with its slow and steady appreciation. By 2020, the investment was worth $20, and it never slipped much, even during the 1929 crash, the burst of the tech bubble in 2000, and the 2008 financial crisis. In contrast, the investment in the S&P 500 stocks is the hare, with remarkable overall performance, despite some dormant periods and occasional setbacks. By 2000, the one-dollar investment in the S&P 500 had turned into a whopping $6,000. Thus, in this race, the hare clearly won. The Treasury bonds and corporate bonds fall in between the Treasury bills and S&P 500 stocks.

I also calculated the average and standard deviation of the returns for each of the four investments and made a graph of these simple statistics, as depicted in Figure 2.7. The S&P 500 stocks not only had the highest standard deviation but also the highest average return. On the other end of the spectrum, the Treasury bills had the lowest standard deviation and the lowest average return. The Treasury bonds and corporate bonds are in the middle along both dimensions. Based on this, we can generalize by stating that higher volatility is associated with higher return. This generalization is one of the important building blocks in finance and holds for groups of securities (i.e., portfolios). The implication is that investors are compensated for taking on risk. Later, we will make some modifications for individual securities by partitioning the volatility into two types.

Figure 2.7 Standard deviation versus average return

You might wonder why the Treasury bonds have greater volatility than Treasury bills, given that they are both issued by the U.S. Treasury and are considered to be free of credit risk. If you recall from the discussion of bond prices over time, the volatility decreases as we got closer to maturity because changes in interest rates are less consequential when bonds are about to mature. That further implies that long-term bonds have greater volatility than short-term bonds, which explains why Treasury bills, with their time to maturity of a maximum of one year, have lower volatility than