Merrill Lynch ESP 401k

Every plan offers participants one (or more) money market funds, so we’ve taken the liberty of adding a generic option to the replication of your plan on Kivalia. While there are many flavors to choose from, money market performance is unlikely to vary notably in this environment – let’s say between 0% and 0.2% annually. Therefore there is no need to spend time finding your plan’s unique money market option(s) within the Kivalia database.

All U.S. publicly-traded investments have a unique ticker symbol used to identify it among financial service providers. For mutual funds the ticker is a 5-letter (all capitalized) symbol ending in “X”. For stocks & ETFs, the symbol will be 3 or 4-letters.

Using an investment’s ticker symbol (instead of typing its name into the Kivalia system) will save you additional effort in cases where the investment’s name differs slightly between your plan administrator and our database, and in cases where a fund provider offers multiple “classes” of a particular mutual fund.

For example, the ticker symbol for the “Fidelity Growth Company” fund is FDGRX, while “Fidelity Growth Company – K”, a lower-cost retirement plan class, has the ticker FGCKX.

You should find the ticker symbol for all your publicly-traded investment options on the website you use to manage your retirement plan. The ticker may be shown alongside each particular option in your overview list, or if not, upon further researching each individual investment option.

You can enter ticker symbols as either upper, or lower-case, within Kivalia.

There are likely to be differences in naming conventions between your retirement plan provider and our database. For example “JP Morgan” may show up as “JPMorgan”, or “J.P. Morgan” in your plan’s investment options. If at first you don’t succeed, try alternative spelling options.

Further, fund names may change over time; typically due to mergers, acquisitions or a re-thinking of management strategy. That’s why we suggest using ticker’s where available; they’re typically more stable.

If you don’t have an investment option’s ticker and can’t find the fund name in our database, start by googling the fund’s name to see if you can find if, and from what, the fund may have transitioned. Then try looking up the fund’s prior name in our database.

Finally, many retirement plans show abbreviations of the investment manager’s name on their trading site. For example, “Alliance Bernstein” might be abbreviated to “AB”, or “Morgan Stanley Institutional” may be known as “MSI”. If you run into an abbreviation on your plan provider’s site, do a little research on the particular fund and focus on finding the management company’s name.

Many mutual fund families offer a range of share classes for their funds – each with differing expenses. For example, within the Kivalia database there are more than five variants of the American Funds Growth Fund of America!

While the performance between classes will be similar, be sure to select the fund class available within your retirement plan. If your share class is not available within the Kivalia database, find the expense ratio of your plan’s offering and compare with those of the various share classes in the Kivalia database. Select the offering in our database that best matches.

In an effort to lower costs, many large employers have transitioned to Pooled Investments and Separately Managed Accounts in recent years. If you have one or more investment options that have “Pooled”, “Account”, or “Strategy” in their name and don’t have a ticker, it’s likely your employer has done so.

While the reduction in cost is beneficial to you, the potential downside is less transparency. Simply put, these are private investments, don’t have publicly disclosed prices, and can’t be researched on external sites such as Kivalia, or Morningstar.

In many cases however, the manager name and strategy are disclosed in the account name, such as “Artisan Small Cap Value Account”. In such instances, you can “proxy” the asset by selecting a similar asset within the Kivalia framework. It won’t be exact, but it should be a good representation of your offering. For example, in the situation above, you could select Artisan Small Cap Value Investor (ARTVX).

In cases where there are multiple classes of potential proxy fund in the Kivalia database, select the one that has an expense ratio most similar to that of your plan’s private offering.

In some cases, in an effort to simplify the selection process for participants, plan administrators have resorted to providing generic naming conventions to their plan’s investment options – things like “Large Cap Growth Fund”, or “International Fund” are all you’re left to go on.

These are the more difficult situations, as you’ll have to drill down into the detail of the fund and look for clues on how it might best be proxied on our platform. Things to look for include;

♦ Who is the manager, or managers?,

♦ Is this a “passively managed” index fund, or an “actively” managed fund.

♦ Is there mention of an index the manager is tracking, or attempting to out-perform, in the description?