Strategies

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ETFs, or Exchanged Traded Funds, are investable portfolios or funds of stocks or bonds, similar to mutual funds, but which trade on exchanges like common stocks. Though similar to mutual funds, most ETFs enjoy a number of advantages over most mutual funds that include greater liquidity, transparency, and tax efficiency, as well as lower costs of ownership over time.

Lifecycle strategies, also known as target date strategies, are diversified stock and bond investment programs that start with high stock, low bond portfolio allocations, and then decrease the stock, increase the bond portfolio allocations over time. Lifecycle strategies are well suited for retirement and other long term objectives, for which they were designed, and are thus often the default choice for these goals. 

Disciplined, methodical, or systematic investment strategies are investment programs that follow a set of predetermined rules or schedule to adjust portfolio allocations over time. The simplest example of a disciplined investment strategy is an index strategy, which weights all securities within a chosen asset class by their market capitalization, and does not deviate from that rule. Another example is programmatic lifecycle strategy, which adjusts the broad portfolio allocation to stocks and bonds to planned weights on a planned schedule. 

Because of their built in immunity to behavioral heuristics and biases, when taken as a group, disciplined investment strategies have shown greater requisite performance consistency than non-disciplined investment strategies. And have usually delivered this consistency at lower cost at the same time. It can thus be said that disciplined investment strategies provide a way for end investors to make more, and keep more, than non-disciplined ones.