Asset Allocation Strategies for Long-Term Investments

As the life expectancy increases resulting in the aged society, the post-retirement life became one of the most important concerns of people. The long-term investment vehicles such as retirement savings and pension plans have been introduced to meet such demand of society. This paper examines the impact of asset allocation strategies on the long-term investment performance. Because of the unusually long investment horizon and the compounding effect, a suboptimal asset mix in a retirement plan can be a very costly and irreversible mistake. Instead of relying on anecdotal evidence to evaluate the merits of different allocation strategies, this paper performs various tests including stochastic dominance tests using both actual data and Monte Carlo simulated data that best fit the historical experience. The results indicate 1) the long-term investments perform better than the short-term investments, 2) the optimal asset allocation strategy for the long-term investments should be highly equity dominated.