This is the biggest problem with retirement funds that no one talks about. There is so much money available that inevitably you end up with investments that are risky despite diversifying.
One of the things that most frustrates me about pension funds and even 401k funds is how my retirement is managed by someone who has no concern for my values and could in fact use my money to oppose my values and best interest(as a whole) in the pursuit of increasing gains.
If your 401k does not have an option for low cost broad market index funds like SP500, then that is a fault of your employer forcing employees to take on extra risk.
Retirement accounts are not intended as general purpose investment vehicles. If everyone could put their 401k/pension in anything, you would see a lot more people getting scammed and gambling on the latest GameStop internet mania. If folks want to invest like that, get a brokerage account. If you want tax-advantaged retirement planning, being limited to less risky things is the tradeoff you make.
There's nothing stopping you from having both at the same time, with the caveat that your contributions to the IRA may not be deductible if you earn over a certain threshold.[1]
Unfortunately this is a 'vote with your feet' situation. If you don't like who is managing your 401k, then work for another company (which is drastic, I know). The other option is to simply write to your plans administrator. Tell them your concerns and organize a letter writing campaign if you are really concerned.
Or with increasing of ESG investing ignore possible gains for political reasons. Thus making my future life worse as they don't extract maximum possible value from market.
Diversifying reduces risk, period. The question is whether the portfolio is diversified enough, relative to its size.
A lack of sufficient opportunity for diversification isn't a problem with the fund, it's a problem with the (investment) market. Offer more opportunities for diversification and the problem resolves. Too bad the economic trend is to consolidate businesses instead of keeping them separate; too bad entrepreneurship is declining; too bad more and more new companies decide to stay private instead of aiming for an IPO.
Why is it a problem with broad market index funds?
Some investments will underperform, and some will overperform. All you should care about is keeping up with inflation, which it should since it is invested in a representative set of the businesses that make up the market.
> you end up with investments that are risky despite diversifying.
Every 15 years some banks fail and we shake our heads. But by and large, investing in banks is probably one of the safest investments one can make, no?
Correct. It would be hard to find a stock where some combination of these players were not the largest shareholders based on the aggregation of all their managed funds.
Apparently they are limited to investing 5% of the fund's money in banks.
Turns out they used 2 of those 5% for investing in these banks.
It is not a disaster though, not even close to a disaster. And talking about banking and market economy, they most likely gained much more money from that than they lost. It just happened very quickly .
Not a disaster, but seems conspicuous. Looks like there is a connection between Signature and SVB and First Republic had a big exposure to SVB. So their risk exposure to a single entity such as SVB was pretty high for a pension fund.
I think what they did was invest too heavily in up&coming banks rather than traditional banks. With the rationale that their technology was more modern.
Not that I know of. However they sold their shares in the somewhat stable swedish banks Handelsbanken and Swedbank in the hunt for the more exotic, nieche bank stocks.
The CEO of Alecta even said in an interview that the 50%+ drop of "First Republic bank" isn't a loss because it hasn't been realized yet. It wouldn't surprise me if he had to leave before the week is over.
Last year they sold all their stocks in the Swedish banks Swedbank and Handelsbanken (they held them for 71 years) to buy SVB and similar banks because they wanted to have more profits. It'll take a while to recover.
Holy sh*t. That is just beyond horrible. But it also shows how difficult it is to evaluate a stock. If a pension fund can't - then how should the average amateur investor do it.
That question comes out often but... Apparently the $2bn realized loss that SIVB took was only about 1/10th of their total unrealized gains. Numbers are floating around now saying there's about $620 billion of unrealized losses among the various banks at the moment (due to the same issue of rates going up after trillions were printed).
Which institution can honestly offer any kind of product hedging against $620 billions of losses without, itself, going bankrupt should people try to exercise their hedge?
Basically the headlines, instead of being: "SVB goes down for it has $20 bn of unrealized losses" would be, instead, "SVB goes down for it has $20 bn of hedged unrealized losses, but the institution which is supposed to cover the hedge is bankrupt for it miscalculated and cannot cover $620 bn".
4th largest shareholder in Signature Bank
5th largest shareholder in First Republic bank.
Lets call it 3 out of 3.