PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Radu Constantin Gabudean TI - Evaluating Target-Date Portfolios: <em>A Practical Approach to Building Family-Wide Measures</em> AID - 10.3905/jor.2015.3.2.080 DP - 2015 Oct 31 TA - The Journal of Retirement PG - 80--92 VI - 3 IP - 2 4099 - https://pm-research.com/content/3/2/80.short 4100 - https://pm-research.com/content/3/2/80.full AB - Investment industry participants are searching for new and better methods for analyzing, measuring, and comparing target date products in light of the additional risks and complexities life-cycle investing entails. This article sets out to build practical measures that describe the investment policy of a target-date family. The solution views each portfolio, or vintage, as a family member rather than as a stand-alone entity, and the framework builds family-wide characteristics by combining the characteristics of individual vintages. The combination is an average across vintages weighted by the expected real wealth accumulation of an investor, or participant, in each vintage. The authors hope their framework will advance the science of target-date portfolio analysis and measurement.Beyond the theoretical justification for weighting by expected real wealth, the major contribution of this article is showing that a set of simple assumptions provides results that are very similar to wealth-weights derived from more complex set-ups. Drastically simplifying the set-up increases confidence in conclusions drawn from comparisons across target-date families and makes such studies much easier to conduct.TOPICS: Retirement, statistical methods