Castille is the top of the BlackRock US Retirement Group. Therefore, Mr. Castille is likely a participant in a 401(k) plan, although to be truthful, I don’t even know if BlackRock offers a 401(k) plan to its employees. More to the real point, this article tells us what participants really want in a 401(k) plan and specifically in a connection fund in that plan. The writer implies that participants are looking for safety, retirement, or return income.
That is a fairly wide spectrum. But, he doesn’t dig into it enough for all of us to know how a plan sponsor or an investment professional would determine. I don’t imply to demean what any professional says. But, I beg to vary with the author here. Participants get a lot of junk in the mail these days (not that these days are actually any not the same as any days for the reason that regard).
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- Beware The Omens, on the importance of the Hindenberg and other omens in the markets
If the participants to whom he could be referring are anything like the ones that I know, they don’t look at specific fund performance very often. In fact, in the entire case of all that I understand, “not very often” is spelled N-E-V-E-R. That’s right; they don’t look at individual finance performance. They look to see how their total accounts do.
They judge (that’s spelled G-U-E-S-S) whether it’s a good day to be in equities or a good day to be in fixed income and regularly move their money around because they think they know. Typically, participants don’t like losses in their accounts. But, I’m just speculating. I don’t really know. And, honestly, the writer of this article doesn’t know any of this either. Face it, he hangs around with investment experts.
Investment professionals are not representative of your average garden variety 401(k) individuals. I am actually the same opportunity dumper, however. While I cannot find data that the writer is using to attract his conclusions from, I shall also take this opportunity to dump on many authors who do use data, from surveys usually. Let me demonstrate why with a good example.
What would you like from your 401(k) connection fund? I’ve never posed this question this way, so I get to speculate at hypothetical results. My think is that they don’t really. Safety has lots of meanings in life. For an investment professional, this means a very important factor. To an idea participant, it might indicate NEVER losing profits. You and I know that is essentially impossible in a bond fund, but the average participant might not.
Some company out there that desires to prove their own point will have a study question such as this one. They will ask about 1,000 randomly selected visitors to answer the questions plus some smart people in the proverbial back again room will evaluate the answers to the author of the next great white paper will have the definitive solution.