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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