Nevin's Data "Points"

Somewhere in the course of your professional life, you have no doubt heard (or used) the expression about what happens when you assume (1) . Well, over the past couple of weeks, I’ve heard a lot of discussion around target-date funds, most recently at the PLANADVISER National Conference (PANC). Without question, plan sponsors and participants—and perhaps not a few retirement plan advisers—were caught off-guard by the varied designs and resulting experiences of these popular investment offerings in recent months (2) . That many participants assumed these offerings were a no-maintenance solution to their retirement security is understandable, IMHO, certainly in view of how they were promoted by their manufacturers, sanctioned (from a design standpoint, anyway) by regulators, and positioned on retirement plan menus. But let’s face it, what happened in the markets last fall happened pretty much everywhere and to everyone (at least everyone who was invested in the markets). And, while the

Sitting in the audience at the ASPPA/DoL Speaks conference last week, I was reminded just how disruptive it can be to have a new boss. The conference, which, IMHO, remains unique in both the quantity and quality of access to Labor Department exports, featured many panelists it has been my pleasure to meet and get to know over the past several years. However we practitioners may struggle from time to time with the regulations and interpretations these folks put together, you don’t have to spend much time with any of them to appreciate just how smart, hard-working, and dedicated they are. Still, I can only imagine what it must have been like to have pressed (as they were surely pressed) to wrap up as much of the pending backlog of regulations in 2008. How it must have felt to see that last package—including the final regulations on investment advice—get all the way to the regulatory finish line, only to have it halted dead in its tracks (see White House Executive Order Snares Fee Disc

If you want to get a quick sense of just how fast time flies, consider that it was only a year ago this week that Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy—the same day that Bank of America announced its plans to acquire Merrill Lynch, and a day on which, not surprisingly, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed down just over 500 points. That, in turn, was just a day before the Fed authorized an $85 billion loan to AIG—and that on the same day that the net asset value of shares in the Reserve Primary Money Fund “broke the buck.” This was made all the more surreal because it was going on while we—and several hundred advisers—were in the middle of our PLANADVISER National Conference. Let’s face it—no matter how busy or hectic your week has been, I’m betting it’s been a walk in the park compared to those times. The funny thing is, looking back (and armed with the prism of 20/20 hindsight), there were lots of signs of the trouble that eventually cascaded like a set of dominos, resetting not