Easier Aging

Following up on our conversation about private assets soon being available in 401k plans, Jason Zweig weighed in and he is not a fan. The most interesting part to me was about an interval fund from Redwood Investment Management, located in Scottsdale. Interval funds are easily bought, usually expensive and have limited liquidity for getting out. We've looked at these before, really hitting on the extent to which interval funds (don't) mark to market. 

Jason reported that Redwood owns shares of its interval fund in its mutual funds. A couple of the mutual funds have interesting names and strategies, one of them appears to apply trend following to high yield, but the results are not interesting. There is a systematic macro fund whose year by year results seem show a lot of equity beta. I would prefer any sort of macro fund to be more of a does its own thing alternative without much obvious correlation to equities. 

The question of double dipping the fees is quickly addressed (the mutual funds are not doing that). 

There was no version of the word complexity in the article but I think Jason was trying to sort out the idea of complexity in a portfolio. I would imagine he'd be less inclined than me to include a little complexity into a mostly simple portfolio. The issues with interval funds make them complex complexity. A mutual fund that offers managed futures or some sort of arbitrage are complex but the access and liquidity are not. Maybe selling a mutual fund is a good idea or maybe it's a bad idea but it can be done without hassle. If someone wants to allocate some of their allocation to complexity into an interval fund, go ahead but as is often the case, there are probably cheaper, simpler ways to add the same effect into a diversified portfolio. 

The FT had a depressing article titled America's Sickness Economy.

The US is spending more money to get inferior outcomes. The short version from me is that our diets are terrible, we do not exercise and we are terrible at treating the chronic maladies caused by our terrible diets and lack of exercise. It has been getting worse, not better, for many years in terms of lifestyle and our political system has been making it worse. I've never been a fan of any politicians but the entire system has become far more dysfunctional than it was in previous decades. 

This has been an area of interest and a topic of conversation here since the start of the original blog site back in 2004. I hope I've come to know and understand more than I did but either way, 20 years have gone by and as opposed to making any progress, things are much worse. Twenty years is a decent chunk of someone's life. Anyone who has been waiting for them to fix it has squandered those twenty years as opposed to trying to prevent/solve their own problem. 

We learn as children that we need to exercise and we learn as children that we should not eat too much sugar. So there's nothing new but still we do not exercise and we do eat too much sugar (and processed food). The list of problems that can be solved and conditions reversed by getting serious about diet and exercise is endless. And even if you don't want to dig in on how that all works, on some level, everyone knows to cut back on sugar and get some exercise. 

Every aspect of aging is easier when you're healthy, fit, have good body composition, can bend down and pick up heavy things, don't have to spend a lot of time at the doctor's office and not taking a bunch prescriptions. 

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