As a 401(k) or 403(b) plan trustee – and likely also a plan participant – you may have two key reasons to want to know how well the investment choices in your plan are performing relative to others you could have selected:

First, and perhaps most important, you want to ensure that you are as safe as possible from potential claims of fiduciary imprudence for holding chronically underperforming choices as investment options in your plan,

And secondly, perhaps you want to help ensure better investment performance for your own account – as a plan participant.

TEPI is making available the Checkup version of Decision Technologies Corporation’s Professional Rapid Review Tool to enable you to see for yourself how the investment choices within your plan compare to all other similar choices. It is easy to use – and incredibly effective.

By simply entering the ticker symbol, or name of a mutual fund or ETF, the tool identifies the asset class to which that fund or ETF belongs.

The Checkup tool then performs an initial comparative analysis of all the mutual fund and ETF choices within that asset class using a default weighting of three factors each for average annual returns and average annual volatility (standard deviation) over multiple time periods.

The tool menu offers a total of 48 factors from which you can choose to customize the selection and weighting of factors in a way that most closely matches the investment goals and preferences of your plan’s participants.

The factors and weightings you choose produce a composite score which ranks all of the available mutual fund and ETF choices within the asset class., enabling you to see how yours have performed relative to the others (not just to an index).

The ProRapidReview tool also charts the results, plotting the composite scores against the numeric rank further helping you to quickly identify the truly superior mutual funds and ETFs within the asset class. 

In all, the Checkup tool will give you valuable insights never before available to plan trustees, insights that will help you determine whether the performance gaps between your plan’s choices and other possible choices are so significant that a protective review is warranted.

You may be surprised to find that choices with much higher average annual returns, over multi-year periods also have similar or lower volatility – in other words often significant return premiums with little to no equivalent risk premium. 

There are many benefits of a protective review including: increased chances of better investment performance and retirement security for plan participants, improved participant satisfaction, improved regulatory compliance,    and the Peace of Mind in knowing that you, as a trustee, have done your best in selecting investment choices which are provably in the best interests of your plan’s participants.

If you’d like to learn more, visit our FAQ page, or better yet, try the Checkup tool to see for yourself how the mutual funds and ETFs in your plan score and rank in comparison with other qualified alternatives.  It will help you determine for yourself the advisability of a TEPI-facilitated protective review for your plan . . . the wider the performance gaps, the more a protective review is likely to help