What Is the Accumulation Phase?

Accumulation phase has two meanings for investors and those saving for retirement. It refers to the period when an individual is working and planning and ultimately building up the value of their investment through savings. The accumulation phase is then followed by the distribution phase, in which retirees begin accessing and using their funds.

How the Accumulation Phase Works

The accumulation phase is also a specific period when an annuity investor is in the early stages of building up the cash value of the annuity. This building phase is followed by the annuitization phase, where payments are paid out to the annuitant.

The accumulation phase essentially begins when a person starts saving money for retirement and ends when they begin taking distributions. For many people, this starts when they begin their working life and ends when they retire from the work world. It is possible to start saving for retirement even before beginning the work phase of one’s life, such as when someone is a student, but it is not common. Typically, joining the workforce coincides with the start of the accumulation phase.

Importance of the Accumulation Phase

Experts state that the sooner an individual begins the accumulation phase, the better, with the long-term financial difference between beginning to save in one’s 20s vs. in the 30s substantial. Postponing consumption by saving during an accumulation period will most often increase the amount of consumption one will be able to have later. The earlier the accumulation period is in your life, the more advantages you will have, such as compounding interest and protection from business cycles.

In terms of annuities, when a person invests money in an annuity to provide income for retirement, they are at the accumulation period of the annuity’s life span. The more invested during the accumulation phase, the more will be received during the annuitization phase.

Real-World Examples

There are many income streams that an individual can build up during the accumulation phase, starting from when they first enter the workforce, or in some cases, sooner. Here are a few of the more popular options.

• Social Security: This is a contribution automatically deducted from every paycheck you receive.
• 401(k): This is an optional tax-deferred investment that can be made paycheck-to-paycheck, monthly, or yearly provided your employer offers such an option. The amount you can set aside has yearly limits and also depends on your income, age, and marital status.
• IRAs: An Individual Retirement Account can be either pretax or after-tax, depending on which option you choose. The amount you can invest varies year-to-year, as set out by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and depends on your income, age, and marital status.
• Investment portfolio: This refers to an investor’s holdings, which can include assets such as stocks, government, and corporate bonds, Treasury bills, real estate investment trusts (REITs), exchange-traded funds (ETFs), mutual funds, and certificates of deposits. Options, derivatives and physical commodities like real estate, land and timber can also be included in the list.
• Deferred payment annuities: These annuities offer tax-deferred growth at a fixed or variable rate of return. They allow individuals to make monthly or lump-sum payments to an insurance company in exchange for guaranteed income down the line, typically 10 years or more.
• Life insurance policies: Some policies can be useful for retirement, such as if an individual pays an after-tax, fixed amount annually that grows based on a particular market index. The policy would need to be the kind that allows the individual to withdraw in retirement the principal and any appreciation from the policy essentially tax-free.

What Is Absolute Return?

Absolute return is the return that an asset achieves over a specified period. This measure looks at the appreciation or depreciation, expressed as a percentage, that an asset, such as a stock or a mutual fund, achieves over a given period.

Absolute return differs from relative return because it is concerned with the return of a particular asset and does not compare it to any other measure or benchmark.

How Absolute Return Works

Absolute return refers to the amount of funds that an investment has earned. Also referred to as the total return, the absolute return measures the gain or loss experienced by an asset or portfolio independent of any benchmark or other standard. Returns can be positive or negative and may be considered uncorrelated to other market activities.

Relative and Absolute Returns

In general, a mutual fund seeks to produce returns that are better than its peers, its fund category, and the market as a whole. This type of fund management is referred to as a relative return approach to fund investing. The success of the asset is often based on a comparison to a chosen benchmark, industry standard, or overall market performance.

As an investment vehicle, an absolute return fund seeks to make positive returns by employing investment management techniques that differ from traditional mutual funds. Absolute return investment strategies include using short selling, futures, options, derivatives, arbitrage, leverage, and unconventional assets. Absolute returns are examined separately from any other performance measure, so only gains or losses on the investment are considered.

The History of Absolute Return Funds

Alfred Winslow Jones is credited with forming the first absolute return fund in New York in 1949. In recent years, the absolute return approach to fund investing has become one of the fastest-growing investment products in the world and is more commonly referred to as a hedge fund.

Hedge Funds

A hedge fund is not a specific form of investment; it is an investment structured as a pool and set up as either a limited partnership or limited liability company (LLC). A hedge fund manager raises funds by working with outside investors. The manager uses the funds to invest based on a declared strategy involving only the purchase of long equities, such as common stock.

Hedge funds may specialize in specific areas, such as real estate or patents, and may also engage in private equity activities. While anyone may invest in a hedge fund, participants are traditionally accredited and sophisticated investors.

Example of Absolute Return

As a historical example, the Vanguard 500 Index ETF (VOO) delivered an absolute return of 150.15% over the 10-year period ending Dec. 31, 2017. This differed from its 10-year annualized return of 8.37% over the same period. Further, because the S&P 500 Index had an absolute return of 153.07% over the same period, absolute return differed from the relative return, which was -2.92%. 

What Is Anchoring?

Anchoring is a heuristic in behavioral finance that describes the subconscious use of irrelevant information, such as the purchase price of a security, as a fixed reference point (or anchor) for making subsequent decisions about that security. Thus, people are more likely to estimate the value of the same item higher if the suggested sticker price is $100 than if it is $50.

In sales, price, and wage negotiations, anchoring can be a powerful tool. Studies have shown that setting an anchor at the outset of a negotiation can have more effect on the final outcome than the intervening negotiation process. Setting a starting point that is deliberately too high can affect the range of all subsequent counteroffers.

Understanding Anchoring

Anchoring is a cognitive bias in which the use of an arbitrary benchmark such as a purchase price or sticker price carries a disproportionately high weight in one’s decision-making process. The concept is part of the field of behavioral finance, which studies how emotions and other extraneous factors influence economic choices.

In the context of investing, one consequence of anchoring is that market participants with an anchoring bias tend to hold investments that have lost value because they have anchored their fair value estimate to the original price rather than to fundamentals. As a result, market participants assume greater risk by holding the investment in the hope the security will return to its purchase price.

Market participants are often aware that their anchor is imperfect and attempt to make adjustments to reflect subsequent information and analysis. However, these adjustments often produce outcomes that reflect the bias of the original anchors.

Anchoring Bias

An anchoring bias can cause a financial market participant, such as a financial analyst or investor, to make an incorrect financial decision, such as buying an overvalued investment or selling an undervalued investment. Anchoring bias can be present anywhere in the financial decision-making process, from key forecast inputs, such as sales volumes and commodity prices, to final output like cash flow and security prices.

Historical values, such as acquisition prices or high-water marks, are common anchors. This holds for values necessary to accomplish a certain objective, such as achieving a target return or generating a particular amount of net proceeds. These values are unrelated to market pricing and cause market participants to reject rational decisions.

Anchoring can be present with relative metrics, such as valuation multiples. Market participants using a rule-of-thumb valuation multiple to evaluate securities prices demonstrate anchoring when they ignore evidence that one security has a greater potential for earnings growth.

Some anchors, such as absolute historical values and values necessary to accomplish an objective, can be harmful to investment objectives, and many analysts encourage investors to reject these types of anchors. Other anchors can be helpful as market participants deal with the complexity and uncertainty inherent in an environment of information overload. Market participants can counter anchoring bias by identifying the factors behind the anchor and replacing suppositions with quantifiable data.

Comprehensive research and assessment of factors affecting markets or a security’s price are necessary to eliminate anchoring bias from decision-making in the investment process.

Examples of Anchoring Bias

It is easy to find examples of anchoring bias in everyday life. Customers for a product or service are typically anchored to a sales price based on the price marked by a shop or suggested by a salesperson. Any further negotiation for the product is in relation to that figure, regardless of its actual cost.

Within the investing world, anchoring bias can take on several forms. For instance, traders are typically anchored to the price at which they bought a security. If a trader bought stock ABC for $100, then they will be psychologically fixated on that price for judging when to sell or make additional purchases of the same stock — regardless of ABC’s actual value based on an assessment of relevant factors or fundamentals affecting it.

In another case, analysts may become anchored to the value of a given index at a certain level instead of considering historical figures. For example, if the S&P 500 is on a bull run and has a value of 3,000, then analysts’ propensity will be to predict values closer to that figure rather than considering the standard deviation of values, which have a fairly wide range for that index.

Anchoring also appears frequently in sales negotiations.  A salesman can offer a very high price to start negotiations that is objectively well above fair value. Yet, because the high price is an anchor, the final selling price will also tend to be higher than if the salesman had offered a fair or low price to start. A similar technique may be applied in hiring negotiations when a hiring manager or prospective hire proposes an initial salary. Either party may then push the discussion to that starting point, hoping to reach an agreeable amount that was derived from the anchor.

Correction—July 21, 2022: This article was updated to make clear a risk of anchoring resulting in buying overvalued assets or selling undervalued ones, not buying undervalued assets and selling overvalued ones.