Liability Matching

An increasingly popular investment strategy that attempts to time future assets sales and income streams to match against expected future expenses. The strategy has become widely embraced among pension fund managers, who attempt to minimize a portfolio's liquidation risk by ensuring asset sales, interest and dividend payments correspond with expected payments to pension recipients. This stands in contrast to simpler strategies that attempt to maximize return without regard to withdrawal timing.

Liability matching is growing in popularity among sophisticated financial advisers and wealthy individual clients, who are using multiple growth and withdrawal scenarios to ensure that adequate cash will be available when needed. The use of the Monte Carlo method of analysis, which uses a computer program to average the results of thousands of possible scenarios, has grown in its popularity as a time saving tool used to simplify a liability matching strategy.