401K’s can be self-managed. But you have to take it upon yourself to do so if you don’t, you will get dumped into a hodgepodge fund where you have the high performing and the low performing thrown together, the purpose is to average everything out in a safe conservative investment strategy.

If you take control and invest in individual companies and pay attention to what they’re actually doing, your returns can be a lot higher over time, however not all blue chip stocks are equal. Many are slugs some of the lowest performing stocks cruising on past reputation ie.. IBM or Intel, for example, both have come up a little bit from their low watermarks but they are nowhere near what they were in their heyday and probably never will be.

The article is not strictly about pension funds. There are several mentions of individual retirement accounts.