  Investors in Target Date Funds are automatically switched from high risk to
low risk assets as their retirements approach. Such funds have become very
popular, but our analysis brings into question the rationale for them. Based on
both a model with parameters fitted to historical returns and on bootstrap
resampling, we find that adaptive investment strategies significantly
outperform typical Target Date Fund strategies. This suggests that the vast
majority of Target Date Funds are serving investors poorly.
