Will Congress, the SEC and the DOL upgrade the current fiduciary standard to the trust model used by bank trust departments so successfully for more than a century?
Tag "401k"
As usual, be careful about elixirs marketed as cure-alls. Personally involved in creating CITs in the early 1990s specifically to market to 401k plans, I’ll share my experiences with you here.
$16.5 million is a large price to pay for disclosure and due diligence a plan fiduciary can simply and consistently address. This may be the easiest action a 401k plan fiduciary to take to prevent the camel from sticking his nose under the tent.
The question now on the mind of every 401k fiduciary: Will the DOL’s new rule increase my personal fiduciary liability?
Why wait until now to bring up the three-month old blog? The bigger question, however, remains, “How should a 401k fiduciary analyze mutual fund fees?”
Many feel the DOL rightly reversed earlier rules that allowed for too many potential conflicts-of-interest. But, will any new DOL guidelines only encourage a “cookie-cutter” approach, doing the investor more harm than good?
Sometimes something that appears too good to be true really is. Professionals have long known the potential pitfalls of ETFs. Only recently have these facts become more widely known. Don’t be surprised if, like a tube of toothpaste, squeezing one problem away only creates a bulge in a different problem.
A typical 401k plan fiduciary has no doubt read about this new product. Fiduciary News goes deeper to reveal answers to some of the more critical questions the astute fiduciary might have about BrightScope’s Personal Fee Report.
2009 exposed a much deeper problem with Target Date Funds. Pitched as the be-all-and-end-all to 401k investors, these funds fell flat on their collective face as 2008’s down market exposed them as more sizzle than steak. Washington might help, but a knee-jerk reaction to 2008 is not a good solution at all.
Awful returns suggest investors should have shunned equities during the century’s first decade. Or do they? A closer examination reveals a surprising conclusion, one that might upset the fastest growing segment of the financial industry.
