A strong team and modest costs render the JPMorgan SmartRetirement Blend target date series attractive.
A team of veterans led by Dan Oldroyd guide this effort. He served as deputy to former lead Anne Lester from 2010 through May 2020. Lester’s departure was a significant blow, and two other managers have come off the series in recent years. However, Oldroyd is still backed by experienced personnel in the primary areas of focus: retirement research, tactical allocation, and manager selection. The team also brought in Ove Fladberg and Anshul Mohan, veteran portfolio managers on the multi-asset team, to assist its efforts in 2022 and 2023, respectively. Michael Conrath, who led the firm’s 529 plan group for more than a decade, took over as chief retirement strategist after his predecessor left for another firm.
This target-date series is built on strong retirement research. It uses participant data from Chase Bank as well as the Employee Benefit Research Institute to help formulate its glide path. That led to the development of its SmartSpending program, woven into this series in 2021-22. The firm devised SmartSpending to help investors fund discretionary spending throughout retirement by orbiting around the long-term risk profile of a blended 40%/60% MSCI All Country World Index/Bloomberg US Aggregate Bond Index. The program is geared for the investor to sell off shares of the investment annually. This approach requires active involvement from plan participants to draw down their savings—not a given in the set-it-and-forget-it world of target-date funds—but the team cut its teeth researching the behavior of plan participants, and we remain confident that it can execute.
The team also had a previous history of making savvy tactical allocation calls. However, the team's calls detracted value in much of the market volatility of 2018-22, and the first three quarters of 2023. At times the series has missed out on equity rebounds by being too conservative, as in the first three quarters of 2023, for example. But it was also overweight in stocks coming into 2022, which hurt in the early stages of that year's bear market. The team hasn’t necessarily lost its ability to make correct calls—it added value in 2020's up-and-down market—but these issues bear watching.