Morningstar Patents Retirement Savings
| Jul 16th, 2007 | Filed under: Hedge Fund Regulation | By: Alpha Male |
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Well, maybe not retirement per se. But Ibbotson (now under the Morningstar umbrella) recently convinced examiners at the US Patent Office that adjusting a retirement portfolio based on the amount of time until a worker retires was patent-worthy. According to the US Patent Office website, the patent was awarded on May 8, 2007. But it wasn’t until last Friday that the firm released a statement saying “Nyaaa, nyaaaa! We gotta a patent!” (we paraphrase here).
This patent reminds us of Research Affiliates’ recent patent on fundamental indexation (see related posting, “The Patent King of Pasadena“). Both make liberal use of the terms “machine-readable medium…” and “processor performs the steps…” to differentiate their “inventions” from generic and broadly-understood concepts. Says Ibbotson’s statement:
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[...] Anyhow, having joyously discovered the excellent AllAboutAlpha (amongst a few other gems of the financial blogosphere thanks to CASTrader), I couldn’t help but to point you towards their Morningstar Patents Saving for Retirement post. [...]