Products October 17, 2007

Trio Forms Target Date Consultant Firm

October 17, 2007 (PLANSPONSOR.com) - Two consultants and a university professor have teamed up to form a company to help advisers and plan sponsors better evaluate target date/lifecycle fund offerings.
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Involved in Target Date Analytics (TDA) are Ronald J. Surz, president of PPCA Inc.;Joe Nagengast, President, Turnstone Advisory Group LLC; and Craig Israelsen, a Brigham Young University professor.   

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According to a news release, TDA executives believe that target date funds should protect retirement savings against loss and grow the assets as much as possible without jeopardizing that pool of money.

The company will apply its standards for achieving these goals and evaluate the target date industry through aggregates of industry practices. TDA will focus on both registered mutual funds and collective trust vehicles.

The announcement said TDA has gathered extensive monthly total return data from January 1, 1998 through September 30, 2007. TDA will provide alpha, beta and R-squared data for all target date mutual funds.and collective trusts.

Each fund is being assigned into Conservative, Moderate, or Aggressive categories, using correlations to TDA indexes as the determinant, the company said.

More information about TDA is  here .

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