Is This an Accumulator or a Decumulator Market?

In the simplistic world of financial planning you fall into one of three categories: an accumulator building a nest egg, a decumulator drawing down your nest egg and a live for today, borrow and spend type who will worry about retirement when it gets here. For the record there are too many in this latter category.

All three show up on the investment manager/financial planner's doorstep and the fact is only the first two can be helped unless the live for today person has had a revelation and has years to go before they want to build a nest egg or happily has been the beneficiary of an inheritance, won the lottery etc.

So what about the market for the accumulator and decumulator categories? Here are some market indices as reported by Schwab in their performance module. The returns are thru the close of business on 10/14/2016:

Market Index        3 months     YTD     1 year     5 years
S&P 500               -0.9              6.17       9.30       14.15
MSCI EAFE          1.22           -.47        -1.05        5.56
Russell 2000          1.21           8.01        8.25       12.77
Barclay's Bond     -0.50           5.08        3.84         3.10
Citi 3-mo. TB        0.07           0.20        0.21         0.08
S&P GSCI             1.60           7.72     -11.53      -13.54

Note that the 5 year number is an average annualized return. The S&P GSCI is an index of commodities produced by Goldman Sachs. The Citi 3-mo. TB (Treasury bill) return is a proxy for cash equivalent investments.

From one perspective the returns have been good for both the accumulator and the decumulator. They have been good for the accumulator because positive returns keep people in the market. On the other hand positive returns means the market is getting more pricey and sometimes gets investors to take more risk than they should. Accumulators would actually be better off if the returns were negative because then they could pick up shares at a lower price and the probability of strong returns going forward would be greater.

Decumulators should be more than satisfied with these returns as long as they stayed away from commodities, didn't park their retirement assets in cash and followed a well conceived asset allocation/drawdown strategy. Most decumulators are retirees. The behavior of markets for the first several years of retirement are critical. The 65 year old who retired 5 years ago is today 70 years old - by the "rule of 72" the annualized 14.15% return on equities has doubled money in the stock market. A retiree could hardly ask for more! Most will find that they took a nice drawdown and today have more than they started with 5 years ago and yet are 5 years closer to the grim reaper.

What more could they ask for?