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How Should You Spend in Retirement? Fixed vs Dynamic Withdrawal Strategies
Retirement Planning Kieran Cook Retirement Planning Kieran Cook

How Should You Spend in Retirement? Fixed vs Dynamic Withdrawal Strategies

Retirement doesn’t mean the end of financial planning—it’s just the start of a new phase. The big question shifts from ‘how much should I save?’ to ‘how much can I safely spend?’ This deceptively simple issue—known as your withdrawal strategy—has generated decades of research, debate, and rule-of-thumb solutions.

Should you stick to a fixed rule like the classic 4% approach? Or should your spending flex with the markets to reduce the risk of running out of money?

In this post, we examine fixed vs dynamic withdrawal strategies, the academic evidence behind them, and—crucially—how to balance what’s financially sound with what’s emotionally sustainable. Because at the end of the day, retirement is about living well—not living anxiously.

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Why the DCF Model Doesn’t Work for Options and How Black-Scholes-Merton Changed Everything
Investment Theory Kieran Cook Investment Theory Kieran Cook

Why the DCF Model Doesn’t Work for Options and How Black-Scholes-Merton Changed Everything

Most finance textbooks start with the discounted cash flow (DCF) model—project the cash flows, pick a discount rate, and voilà: you’ve got a valuation. It’s neat, tidy, and timeless.

But try applying it to an option and the whole thing falls apart.

Options don’t behave like bonds or businesses. Their value hinges not on steady cash flows but on uncertainty, volatility, and probability. And that’s precisely why the DCF model fails—and why a revolutionary model was needed. Enter the Black-Scholes-Merton model: a groundbreaking approach that reimagined valuation through the lens of hedging, replication, and risk-neutral probabilities.

This post explores why options broke the DCF mould—and how Black, Scholes, and Merton changed finance forever.

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Rethinking Risk and Return: The Intertemporal Capital Asset Pricing Model (ICAPM)
Investment Theory Kieran Cook Investment Theory Kieran Cook

Rethinking Risk and Return: The Intertemporal Capital Asset Pricing Model (ICAPM)

The Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) remains a cornerstone of modern finance, showing how risk and return are linked through a single factor: market beta. But real-world investors care about more than just today’s risk—they care about how their investment opportunities change over time. That’s where the Intertemporal Capital Asset Pricing Model (ICAPM) comes in. Introduced by Merton (1973), the ICAPM extends the CAPM’s single-period framework to a dynamic, multi-period world, where investors hedge against changes in income, inflation, volatility, and other economic risks. This post explores how the ICAPM reframes asset pricing, explains anomalies, and offers a more realistic foundation for portfolio construction and long-term investing.

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What Do Systematic Fund Managers Actually Believe?
Practical Investing Kieran Cook Practical Investing Kieran Cook

What Do Systematic Fund Managers Actually Believe?

When it comes to systematic investing, the labels can be misleading. Index fund. Smart beta. Factor strategy. Quant active. These terms are often used interchangeably, but behind them lie profoundly different beliefs about how markets work—and how best to capture returns.

This post dives beneath the surface to explore the investment philosophies of seven major firms: Research Affiliates, AQR, Dimensional, Avantis, Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street. Some believe markets are efficient and best owned passively. Others think anomalies exist—persistent patterns like value, momentum or low volatility—that can be systematically harvested.

Same data, same markets. But radically different interpretations.

If you’ve ever wondered why one firm tilts towards small-cap value, another reweights by fundamentals, and another just hugs the benchmark, this breakdown is for you.

Understanding these differences isn’t just academic—it shapes how portfolios are built, how returns are earned, and what risks investors take on along the way.

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