Your workplace pension statement arrives, you look at the balance, and you close it. That is what almost everyone does, and there is nothing wrong with it.
Here is what the statement does not show you.
Somewhere in your plan there is a fund, or a few funds, that your money actually sits in. You chose them once, probably years ago, from a list at sign-up. Or nobody chose and you got the default. Since then the balance has gone up and down, and the statement has shown you where it landed. It has never shown you how rough the trip was.
That matters more than it sounds. Two funds can end a year in the same place, and one of them could have swung twice as hard along the way. If you are twenty years from retiring, that swinging may not matter to you at all. If you are three years away, it might matter a great deal.
Why it is hard to look up
The funds inside a workplace plan are not the ones you find by searching the internet. They often carry names that mean nothing outside the plan, and they do not turn up where people usually look investments up. Your provider publishes the data. It does not publish it in a form anybody would sit down and read.
What we do
Every day we take that published data and work out how much each fund has actually moved over the past year. Then we put a plain label on it. LOW, MEDIUM, HIGH or EXTREME.
That is the whole idea. One number, turned into one word, updated every day, for the funds that are actually inside Canadian workplace plans.
What the label does not mean
This is the part worth reading twice.
HIGH does not mean bad. It does not mean something has gone wrong, and it is not a sign that you should do anything. A fund built to grow over twenty years is supposed to move. If it sat still it would not be doing its job.
The label tells you the size of the ride. Whether that ride suits you depends on your age, your plans, what else you have put away, and rules inside your plan that we cannot see. We know none of that, so we do not tell you what to do about it.
What we will not do
We are not advisers. We will never tell you to buy, sell, hold or switch anything, and we do not manage anybody’s money. If something here makes you want to change what you are in, the next step is a conversation with someone licensed to have it.
Some funds on our site say UNRATED. That means we have the fund’s price history but not a measurement of it we would stand behind. We would rather show you a gap than a number we invented to fill it.
Free until 30 November
All of it is free for everyone until the thirtieth of November. There is no card to enter. Look up your own funds, see what the labels say, and decide for yourself whether it was worth knowing.