Importance of Costs in Target Date Fund Selection Using Three Morningstar Ratings

Although target date mutual funds (TDFs) have only been around since the mid-1990s, they are now common vehicles for retirement investing. Sixty percent of US companies now automatically funnel employees’ non-directed retirement funds into TDFs, which account for nearly one-quarter of all savings US workers have in 401(k)s. Helping investors pick among TDFs, Morningstar rates past risk-adjusted performance using a star system and provides forward-looking evaluations of more than 2,500 TDFs using either Analyst Ratings or a newly implemented machine-learning-based Quantitative Ratings. Morningstar assigns Analyst Ratings to a smaller subset of TDFs that tend to have been in existence the longest and have the largest size. We find that TDFs with lower fees have significantly higher star ratings than their higher expense counterparts. No-load TDFs have significantly higher star ratings than their load-charging counterparts. In assessing future fund prospects, TDFs with low expense ratios are favored by both analysts and artificial intelligence. TDFs without load charges have significantly better Quantitative Ratings than their load charging counterparts. TDFs with Quantitative Ratings tend to be smaller, younger, and have poorer prior performance than TDFs with Analyst Ratings. TOPICS: Long-term/retirement investing, mutual funds/passive investing/indexing, information providers/credit ratings Key Findings ▪ Target date funds (TDFs) with low expenses and without load charges have significantly higher Morningstar star ratings of past risk-adjusted performance. These same low-cost funds have higher Morningstar Analyst ratings and Quantitative ratings, which estimate future fund prospects of performance. ▪ Regression results suggest Morningstar’s two forward-looking fund ratings are not perfect substitutes. Analyst ratings weight fund expense and fund age more heavily (both negatively) while the computer-generated Quantitative ratings are more positively influenced by past fund performance. ▪ Morningstar’s star ratings, Analyst ratings, and Quantitative ratings all suggest that retirement investing will result in a larger nest egg when attention is restricted to no-load, low-expense TDFs. Additionally, the ratings suggest investors should favor larger but relatively younger funds.