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The article reports on the decade-long bull market that keeps rolling which became the longest such run in U.S. history on August 22, 2018. Topics discussed include the question faced by investors of whether they should be taking some money off the table and ideas for investors such as considering whether their tolerance has changed in terms of what sort of drop they could tolerate and considering how much risk their plans require.

Some big retirement plans offer investors the chance to hire an independent adviser that can help them choose their investments. But your plan provider will soon be able to offer the advice itself, as long as it meets rules issued recently by the Department of Labor. Before the new regulations, which are effective Dec. 27, 401(k), individual retirement plan providers were required to hire an independent adviser to provide advice. That's because the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, the law known as Erisa that governs retirement plans, prohibited advisers from recommending investments if they were paid for other services like administering the plans in the first place. This was to avoid conflicts of interest where the administrator would put its own mutual funds on the menu and push them on participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investors have flocked to the ''set it and forget it'' style of mutual funds known as target-date funds, where the mix of investments automatically becomes more conservative as the retirement date approaches. But when the markets plunged, it became readily apparent that some funds did a better job of protecting investors than others. What was most surprising, however, was the wide variation in performance among funds with the same target date. And most alarmingly, some 2010 funds lost more than the Standard & Poor's 500 Index. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Target-date funds have come under fire in recent months for failing to shelter investors, especially those near retirement, from the market maelstrom. Many of the funds -- which are supposed to have an increasingly conservative investment mix as an investor reaches a retirement date -- failed investors last year. But so did a lot of broadly diversified portfolios carefully customized by financial planners. The market collapse spared no one (except for those heavily invested in Treasuries, of course). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]