Happy Friday, readers! Heading into the second weekend of each month we compile the timeliest and most informative articles filed under the heading of Investing in recent weeks. With broad market indices riding once again near record highs, clients must be reminded of the importance of maintaining their risk tolerance carefully. And while returns in the last year have been quite strong, asset managers continue to pare down their long-term capital growth expectations, some to the low single digits. We hope the reporting collected below offers helpful context for navigating the markets as 2018 quickly approaches.
Few retirement plan investors may actually mirror their portfolios to a U.S. total market index—but there are still some important implications to be found in the record-setting performance of the Wilshire 5000, beyond the relative growth of small-cap and large-cap.
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The drivers behind a target-date manager offering open architecture most commonly include the belief that participants benefit from asset manager diversification and the need to outsource allocations to access best-in-class strategies, Cerulli reports.
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One clear way to help prevent retirement plan leakage is to help families cope with financial shocks and income volatility in the short term; one way to do this is to encourage use of “sidecar accounts.”
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Only 21% of advisers surveyed reported feeling very well informed about responsible investing strategies, and the survey found accessing ESG data is a challenge for advisers.
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MFS data show that relative global growth trends have held steady since 2012: Developed economies have hovered between 0.5% and 2% gross domestic product (GDP) growth while emerging economies have ranged between 3.5% and 5% over that time. Interesting in the current political environment, manufacturing performance indicators have been more even across global and developed economies.
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