CANNEX Announces Patent for Withdrawal Rate Optimization

Toronto, November 11, 2014 – The QWeMA Group, a division of CANNEX announced today that its methodology for determining optimal retirement portfolio withdrawal rates in the face of longevity risk has been granted a patent by the United States Patent & Trademark Office. Professors Moshe Milevsky and Huaxiong Huang of York University developed the underlying withdrawal methodology.

The patented methodology responds to the challenges being faced by the world’s growing number of retirees, who are living longer and having difficulty meeting their retirement income needs. While there are a number of planning tools that help individual investors accumulate assets for retirement, there is very little in the way of tools that help retirees continuously evaluate and adjust their personalized portfolio withdrawal rate during retirement.

Only a small percentage of experienced investors and advisors have an established process for monitoring and adjusting withdrawal rates periodically. Those with limited retirement income planning experience often rely on general rules and guidelines based on withdrawing a fixed percentage (e.g. 4%) of assets regardless of an individual’s longevity or attitudes toward risk; potentially leading to sub-optimal results.

This new patent will enable CANNEX to provide more dynamic evaluation tools and analytic support to investors and advisors.

“With this patent, CANNEX is now able to create calculators that will determine a personalized withdrawal rate that not only takes into consideration an individual’s age and risk preferences, but also is consistent with the rational tradeoff between risk and return,” said Faisal Habib, president of QWeMA.

The full text of the patent (Patent No. 8,781,937.) is available on United States Patent and Trademark Office’s website at www.uspto.gov.

Contact CANNEX at cannex@cannex.com for further information.