You’re not wrong, but are there pension funds that include revenue made from shorting stocks? Seems like a reckless practice if there are.

Shorts are often (usually) a legit way to reduce risk - if the stock falls, you’re not losing everything. But that’s less entertaining to report about, so you rarely read about this in the non-technical news.

Yes but those aren't naked shorts. You don't get short interest in 140% of the total shares available from people hedging their holdings. That did happen with GME and it's what the r/WSB people picked up on.

> You don't get short interest in 140% of the total shares available from people hedging their holdings

Of course you do. I buy a share. I loan it to you. You sell it short. That buyer pledges it to a third person. Et cetera.

The person who borrowed sold naked then. Covered would be if you they a protective call option no ?

And if it doesn't fall you lose money. You can't just reduce risk without also reducing gains.

> You can't just reduce risk without also reducing gains.

You can (assuming you haven’t exhausted all available independent investment opportunities with equivalent risk/reward profile) reduce risk without reducing expected gains.

Doing so (assuming you were investing suboptimally for your the prior risk level and expected returns) involves reducing in the part of the distribution above the mean offsetting the increase in the part below the mean.

Buying a 10% interest in each of 10 lottery tickets (ignoring practical risks associated with deals to split winnings) doesn't reduce your gains compared to buying one lottery ticket, it just reduces your risk.

This is the whole point of diversification.

But in the case of something like a pension, reducing risk is often the goal, right?

The goal is to make enough money for pensioners to live off.

If the goal was to reduce risk then pensions would be better off being held in cash. But pension funds dont have enough cash to meet needs so they have to grow.

Pension pots actually often do follow a path of minimising risk, with the percentage held in cash and government bonds increasing as pensionable age nears.

They have a specific percentage growth targets which gets adjusted periodically based on interest rates and life expectancy.

I am far from the most knowledgeable HNer on this topic, but my understanding is that pension funds are more conservative than most, but that they do get involved in riskier asset classes as well. They probably allocate a portion of their assets to hedge funds or VCs because otherwise they miss out on lots of upside. Of course, there can be downside as well...

holding a hedged portfolio (with shorts) is less risky than a long only portfolio in the vast majority of cases.

Moreover some asset that is risky on it's own can decrease the risk of the entire portfolio. From a quantitative perspective, specific risk from an asset is largely irrelevant (and doesnt carry a risk premium), because it can be diversified away to 0

Right, which means that a single company having a weird day probably won't have much of a noticeable impact on those pensions at all.

Who the hell has a pension any more?

Many/most federal, state, and local government employees (including teachers), among others.

I have a pension from my tech job. Almost all professional full-time jobs offer pensions. It might be in the form of a 401k in the US, but a 401k is just another kind of pension.

They're both forms of retirements savings, but a 401k is a totally different form of retirements savings from a pension.

I don't know why people get confused about this! It's a fund to give you income in retirement. That's a pension! You can have both defined-benefit and defined-contribution pensions. Not all pensions are defined-benefit: 401(k) is a defined-contribution pension.

Wikipedia say it's a pension:

> a 401(k) plan is an employer-sponsored defined-contribution pension

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/401(k)

The US Code also says it's a pension - 401 is 'Qualified pension, profit-sharing, and stock bonus plans' and 401(k) is covered under the 'qualified pension' clause ('qualified' meaning the same as 'defined contribution' in this case.)

If it looks like a pension and quacks like a pension and is called a pension in law and is called a pension in non-technical resources like Wikipedia then... it's a pension!

But it doesn't quack the same as defined-benefits. If 401k tanks no amount of calling it a pension is going to feed you.

I didn’t say it quacks the same as defined-benefits. I said it quacked the same as a pension. Why do you think ‘pension’ inherently means defined-benefits? It doesn’t. That’s just one kind of pension.

What you're describing is "defined-benefit pension" not "pension". As the parent comment quotes, a 401k is a "defined-contribution pension".

Congratulations on buying into wikipedias politically "correct" definition.

How about https://www.dictionary.com/browse/pension

Or maybe for clarity consider the word "pensioner"

Is it still a "pension" when contributions are made your whole life and it crashes to 0 and you never make a withdraw?

Most people call defined contribution plans "retirement savings" plans and defined benefit "pensions". While conceptually at a high level they are the same thing, the difference is in who bears the risk when the plan is underfunded. In the first the risk is entirely born by the individual which frequently doesn't have any choice in the investment companies much less the investments. The latter the risk is squarely on the shoulders of a larger organization, be that a company or as the last resort the government. Aka the risk is socialized/insured.

> Is it still a "pension" when contributions are made your whole life and it crashes to 0 and you never make a withdraw?

Yes?

Why do you think defined-benefit is so important as to be the default, gold standard which owns the name 'pension'?

You're using the legal term to be pedantic. However, it makes nearly 0 sense in this case because with 401(k)s, you can usually only invest in the funds allowed by the plan, not individual stocks.

Does the PBGC guard a 401k against loss?

https://www.pbgc.gov/

No didn't think so...

What makes you think the definition of pension is "protected by the PGBC"? The PGBC's website itself specifies:

> PBGC is a federal agency created by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) to protect pension benefits *in private-sector defined-benefit plans*

Which means by implication that there are pensions in non-defined-benefit plans (ie defined-contribution, like 401ks). Also note that this quote indicates the PGBC doesn't protect public-sector pension plans, which means your logic leads to the ludicrous conclusion that public-sector pensions are somehow not pensions.

This level of confidence combined with this level of ignorance is not a good look.

?

Whats the difference between a government backed pension guarantee and a government pension?

I think your misunderstanding the purpose of the PGBC, particularly if you consider the state of things when it was founded.

Yes they only cover defined-benefit pensions. They say that they cover ‘pension benefits in private-sector defined-benefit plans’. A 401(k) is a defined-contribution pension so it’s out of their scope.

But so what they don’t cover it? Why does that make it less of a pension? Government pensions also aren’t covered by it. Are they not pensions as well?

J&J employees do

No.