Most 401(k) plan providers offer little in the way of investment guidance and far fewer, if any, offer the option of a tactical approach to managing your investments over time. A Smarter Way 401(k) addresses both of these shortcomings.

First, we provide an array of prebuilt allocations for various levels of risk. New plan participants start by taking our risk tolerance questionnaire to determine their appropriate level of risk. This number is used to select an allocation with the corresponding level of risk.

Once this initial step is taken, we assume the responsibility of managing the allocations just as we do with our allocations outside of the 401(k) offering. For more information on how our management process works, please visit the ‘Allocations’ section. To summarize, we reduce risk when we see the long-term direction of the market start to come into question as various fundamental and technical data points begin to weaken.

The 401(k) allocations hold ETFs in lieu of Smarter Way models. Our ETF selection criteria focuses on how well each ETF replicates is benchmark, how cost effective the product is, and how easily it is to trade the position. When our data points indicate uncertainty we will modify the 401(k) allocations to underweight equity-based ETFs, and reallocate funds into non-correlated asset classes such as fixed income, cash, and commodities.