Pensions & Investments gathered information for this report, published annually since 1974, in three steps.
Questionnaires were sent to more than 1,300 fund sponsors in P&I’s database. The largest 1,000 were identified from completed questionnaires, follow-up phone calls and emails, and database searches.
Data for sponsoring entities that did not respond was culled from published annual or quarterly reports and Form 5500s filed with the Department of Labor.
P&I’s survey generally covers the 12 months ended Sept. 30, 2023. In cases where no information was available from the fund, or the data was older than June 30, 2023,
P&I, along with its partner Cognition Solutions, calculated estimates to Sept. 30.
There were a few new questions added to the survey this year. Private credit was added as a stand-alone asset allocation option for defined benefit plans to reflect the growing importance in plans’ portfolios. Energy investments were broken out into clean energy and fossil fuel energy investments and a new breakdown regarding real estate assets was added — categorizing investments by core, core-plus, value-added and opportunistic. For defined benefit plans that disclosed any investments in exchange-traded funds, they were given the option to provide ETF ticker symbols this year.
On the defined contribution side, “other retirement income options” was added as a choice for what was provided within target-date funds, as well as a question asking for specifics on offering a retirement income option. Annuities were already an option within the target-date fund question. Real estate equity assets excluding REITs was also added.
Dollar amounts generally are rounded to the nearest million; in certain tables and charts, they are rounded to billions. The aggregate asset mixes represent the weighted averages of all reported allocations for the respective funds.
All data in this special report is ©2024 Crain Communications Inc. Reproduction without permission is prohibited.
