Cornerstone Archives » TargetQ Views

One Year Later

It’s now been just over a year from that chilling day in March 2020 when the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped nearly 13% while the S&P 500 simultaneously fell 12%. The pandemic had only just been declared as such and we were in our first week of lockdowns and mandatory social distancing. While this historic one-day drop, occurring in a market that still would not arrive at its bottom for another week, certainly kept analysts’ eyes on the screen the fact is that most folks remained less worried about the stock market than they did about the rapid and widespread shuttering of thousands of businesses.

Blending Active and Passive in TDFs

Target Date Funds (TDFs) are often categorized by being active or passive based on the makeup of the underlying holdings. Many issuers also offer blended or hybrid TDF series, which utilize both active and passive underlying holdings. However, the specific blend of active and passive holdings can be very different among issuers.

You cannot be Serie(ou)s!

One of the most decorated tennis players—tied for 14th on the all-time number of grand slams list—is John McEnroe. However, he is probably remembered by most for his frequent questioning of the chair umpire. His most memorable tirade in 1981 at Wimbledon was a quote that eventually provided the title for his memoir… “You cannot be serious!”

What Is A Glide Path?

Target Date Funds' “yellow brick road” is their glide path. The glide path is, in essence, a pre-described mix of the TDFs asset allocation over time. Since the advent of TDFs, it has been universally accepted that the longer a participant's time horizon, the more risk they should accept via higher equity exposure.

Target Date Fund Indices

The advent of the Target Date fund was back in early 1994 (as detailed in an earlier post). As TDFs grew in popularity and more plans/advisors/participants starting using them, a question arose as to how properly measure a TDF's performance.