%0 Journal Article %A Gabriel A. Lozada %T Fixed Income for Retirement Saving: TIAA Traditional’s Lessons on Quality, Duration, Risk, and Gradual Withdrawals %D 2020 %R 10.3905/jor.2020.1.064 %J The Journal of Retirement %P 39-59 %V 7 %N 4 %X TIAA’s Traditional annuity has supported retirements for a century. It resembles a stable-value fund. The author investigates the holdings supporting it, constructs readily available alternatives resembling those holdings, compares the returns of those alternatives with Traditional, and constructs a new measure of risk to compare Traditional’s risk with that of its alternatives in a more appropriate way than by using short-term standard deviation of returns. Under this new measure of risk, which is appropriate for retirement investors, some alternatives exhibited second-degree stochastic dominance over Traditional using 1987–2015 data. However, Traditional may still be a better choice for unsophisticated investors.TOPICS: Retirement, portfolio construction, legal/regulatory/public policyKey Findings• TIAA has reported Traditional Annuity’s returns in nonstandard, sometimes incorrect ways. Its short-term volatility is irrelevant because withdrawals require 9 years.• The duration and quality of TIAA’s General Account can be matched by mutual funds for which feasible historical payouts over 9 years can be inferred.• Over 1987–2015, Traditional’s 9-year payouts were second-degree stochastically dominated, reversing results using shorter-term volatility measures. %U https://jor.pm-research.com/content/iijretire/7/4/39.full.pdf