Defined contribution plans increasingly turned to investments in target-date funds and U.S. equities in 2014. And that may not be such a good thing.

Northern Trust's third annual DC Tracker found that DC plan participants are upping the amount they put into TDFs, which garnered 32.7 percent of asset flows in the plans tracked. TDFs make up 22 percent of all assets by market value in the 2015 DC Tracker, up from 15.7 pecent the previous year. 

Such funds relieve participants of the need to rebalance and decrease the risk level of their investments as they approach retirement, but they're also doing something else: funneling participants more directly into U.S. equities. That's increasing a home bias that may already be counterproductive to true diversification.

Continue Reading for Free

Register and gain access to:

  • Breaking benefits news and analysis, on-site and via our newsletters and custom alerts
  • Educational webcasts, white papers, and ebooks from industry thought leaders
  • Critical converage of the property casualty insurance and financial advisory markets on our other ALM sites, PropertyCasualty360 and ThinkAdvisor
NOT FOR REPRINT

© 2024 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.