JPMorgan SmartRetirement target-date series’ strong team and thorough research process inspire confidence.
A bevy of veteran investors support this series, most notably lead manager Dan Oldroyd. He served as deputy to former lead skipper Anne Lester from 2010 through May 2020 and has since taken over the retirement research effort that she led. The team has lost resources within that cohort—not only Lester, but two other key contributors in 2022 and 2023. However, Oldroyd is still backed by experienced personnel in retirement research, as well as two other areas of focus—tactical allocation and manager selection. The team also brought in Ove Fladberg and Anshul Mohan, veteran multiasset portfolio managers, to assist its efforts. Michael Conrath, who led the firm's 529 plan group for more than a decade, took over as chief retirement strategist in 2023.
The team’s retirement research process 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. The program is geared for the investor to sell off shares annually. This approach requires active involvement from retirement plan participants to draw down their savings. One operational change will be implemented in November—each fund in the series will now merge into the Income fund several years after the target date—but participants can still get targeted annual spend-down advice through the firm’s online tools.
Tactical allocation calls were once a positive here, but they have generally detracted value since 2018. At times, the series has been too conservative, missing out on equity rallies such as the one in 2023. But it was also overweight stocks coming into 2022, when stocks declined. The team did add value in 2020's up-and-down market. But the team’s recent decisions to extend the time horizon of its calls and limit both the size and scope of its moves are prudent.