Bozena Chovancova

University of Economics in Bratislava,

Bratislava, Slovakia,

bozena.chovancova@euba.sk

LONG TERM PASSIVE INVESTMENT STRATEGIES AS A PART OF PENSION SYSTEMS

Peter Arendas

University of Economics in Bratislava,

Bratislava, Slovakia,

p.arendas@centrum.sk

Abstract. The problematics of long term investing is in the centre of attention of many academicians as well as financial professionals. The population in developed and also in emerging countries is aging and the traditional pension schemes start to experience serious  problems. One of the solutions is to establish capitalisation pillars of pension systems. The capitalisation pillars are based on long term investing in stocks, bonds and other securities. Therefore it is important to identify efficient long term investment strategies. This paper compares long term regular investing in  conservative instruments  of money market (t-bills, deposit accounts, etc.) and indexing (investing in portfolio of stocks that tracks a benchmark stock index) in the USA, Japan and Germany over the 1985-2014 time period. The results show that regular investing leads to the cost averaging effect that proves to eliminate the impacts of market turbulences significantly in the long term. The results also show that indexing is superior to conservative investments in the long term, although in Japan the results were slightly in the favour of conservative investments during the 1985-2014 time period.

Received: May, 2015

1st Revision: July, 2015

Accepted: September, 2015

DOI: 10.14254/2071- 789X.2015/8-3/4

JEL Classification: G00, G10, G11

Keywords: passive investment strategy, interest rates, cost averaging effect, indexing, share market