@neari
- Most people can easily manage their own 401K.
- I wrote the following comparing TDFs to a US total market stock fund. Everything in it applies to comparing TDFs to an S&P 500 fund except that an S&P 500 fund has even less diversity than a US total market fund, so it's even less suitable to be the only thing in a retirement portfolio.
- A lot of people have claimed that TDFs are too conservative for a young investor. I disagree, though it does depend on the fund & the investor. Bonds account for very little of the difference in performance between an all-US-stock portfolio & many TDFs designed for young investors.
Bonds have had little impact on the performance of these performance TDFs; it's mostly been the international stocks. Adding international stocks doesn't make a fund more conservative. Historically, US stocks & international stocks have taken turns outperforming each other. US stocks have dominated recently, but that tide could turn at any time.
I'm most familiar with Vanguard's TDFs, so I'll use them as an example. I've never invested in one, but they're a great choice for a lot of investors who value convenience & are willing to pay a little bit for it.
Vanguard TDFs start out with a 90/10 stock/bond allocation & stick with that for many years before starting to gradually shift more towards bonds twenty-five years before the target date.
The difference in performance between a 90/10 portfolio & a 100/0 portfolio is usually pretty small, but the difference in risk is usually much larger. This makes it much easier for an investor to hold onto the TDF through a bear market instead of selling in a panic, a move that would cost much more than the performance difference.
For a US-only portfolio, over the last 30+ years, the performance difference has been less than 0.4% CAGR. However, the risk (standard deviation) difference has been about 1.5%. (I expect longer time periods would show similar results.) 22 years into this comparison, the 90/10 portfolio was slightly ahead. Only the longest bull market in US history created much of a gap.
Why then, you may ask, have funds like Vanguard Total Stock Market Fund (VTSAX & VTI) beaten Vanguard's TDFs by such a large margin recently? The answer is not bonds; it's international stocks.
So, pick an all-US-stock portfolio (total market or S&P 500) over a TDF if you like. But please understand that the TDF is only slightly more conservative & has its own advantages. Of course, past performance is not an indicator of future results.
https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-asset-class-allocation?s=y&mode=1&timePeriod=2&startYear=1972&firstMonth=1&endYear=2023&lastMonth=12&calendarAligned=true&includeYTD=false&initialAmount=10000&annualOperation=0&annualAdjustment=0&inflationAdjusted=true&annualPercentage=0.0&frequency=4&rebalanceType=1&absoluteDeviation=5.0&relativeDeviation=25.0&portfolioNames=false&portfolioName1=Portfolio+1&portfolioName2=Portfolio+2&portfolioName3=Portfolio+3&asset1=TotalStockMarket&allocation1\_1=100&allocation1\_2=90&allocation1\_3=54&asset2=TotalBond&allocation2\_2=10&allocation2\_3=10&asset3=IntlStockMarket&allocation3\_3=36&asset4=GlobalBond
I didn't include international bonds in my analysis because their impact on the portfolio is small. Also, the comparison period would have been much shorter because some years of data are not available for international bonds.
