The adviser's intellectual

Advisers who grapple with the complexities of retirement income will be getting more help next year from Moshe Milevsky, an associate professor of finance at York University in Toronto and executive director of the Individual Finance and Insurance Decisions Centre. Mr. Milevsky, 42, a prolific writer and speaker on the subject, is developing a “withdrawal index” that will serve as a benchmark for financial advisers who want to measure the performance of retirement income portfolios. It will draw on the work he has done in the area of risk pooling and risk management, including the creation of the sequence-of-returns downside-exposure ratio, which measures a portfolio's vulnerability to one-in-100 market catastrophes. “Moshe is one of the seminal thinkers in retirement income,” said Francois Gadenne, chairman and executive director of the Retirement Income Industry Association, which last year gave the professor its lifetime academic achievement award, noting his insights on the role of annuities. Once a critic of annuities, Mr. Milevsky now believes that they should play a role in retirement income planning — especially for those whose income from work is particularly erratic. His recent book “Are You a Stock or a Bond?” (FT Press, 2009) looks at retirement planning from the perspective of human capital and the need to take into account an individual's line of work and the steadiness or irregular nature of income from his or her job.
As a tenured professor with a relatively secure income and pension, Mr. Milevsky quips that he's a bond, which translates into an aggressive risk- and equity-oriented stance in his investment portfolio. When not teaching, writing — his latest book, “Your Money Milestones: A Guide to Making the 9 Most Important Financial Decisions of Your Life” (FT Press), will be published next month — doing research, speaking to financial professionals or spending time with his wife and four daughters, Mr. Milevsky is busy with the Quantitative Wealth Management Analytics Group Inc. The company is a software developer that markets proprietary retirement income analytics he developed.