Regarding that alleged 'near-death' of equities
Interesting data from a recent report on the saving and investing habits of investors shows that yes, stock fund purchasing is down, but the typical plan account is still majority equities. And also, it's never just that simple.
Interesting data from a recent report on the saving and investing habits of investors shows that yes, stock fund purchasing is down, but the typical plan account is still majority equities. And also, it's never just that simple.
My friend Jason Zweig (of the WSJ's Total Return blog) dug up some interesting data from a recent report on the saving and investing habits of investors.聽 Vanguard looked at 3 million retirement plan accounts it administered and determined that yes, stock fund purchasing is down, but the typical plan account is still 65% equities.聽 And also, it's not quite that simple...
The deal with the target date fund popularity is very simple: First, they are in every plan now, just about.聽 It's one of the few things mutual funds have come up with in the past decade that actually makes sense in their wrapper and has stuck.聽 Second, the concept of auto-rebalancing based on a goal off in the future (as opposed to trying to time markets and retirement concurrently) is an extremely attractive one for the severely tormented investor class circa 2012.
Make no mistake, this is the investor saying "I can't even deal with this anymore, here - you do it for me."