Within the last five years, the company has boosted its allocation to non-U.S. equity and non-U.S. fixed income in its retirement funds. This isn’t about market timing, Martielli says, but rather a response to the greater ease and decreased cost in accessing these growing markets and the acceptance by U.S. investors of foreign names. Vanguard target-date funds have 40% of the equity portion allocated to non-U.S. equities and 30% of the fixed-income portion allocated to non-U.S. investment-grade bonds, he says.

The company has been spending a lot of time talking to plan sponsors and participants about the benefits of investing in broadly diversified stocks and bonds, says Martielli, and about setting expectations. It’s less probable that equity performance will be as robust in the next 10 years as it was in the last 10, he says.

Katie Taylor, vice president of thought leadership at Fidelity Investments, also reports calm conditions. “We actually don’t see a ton of people making exchanges in and out of their mutual funds or other securities held in their 401(k) plans,” she says.

During the 2008 market collapse, one in 10 participants made an exchange (selling out of one mutual fund and buying another), she says, and exchanges have continued to hover around 10% no matter what the market has done since. According to Fidelity, it seems that employees making exchanges are generally switching to a more conservative investment.

Fidelity isn’t receiving a significant spike in call volume from plan participants worried about the market the way it was a decade ago. “Nothing notable that would say, oh man, people are really freaking out about this,” says Taylor.

She also partly attributes the calmness to the rise of target-date funds. “Upwards of 90% of the sponsors we work with offer some sort of target-date fund,” she says, and more than 70% of millennials are 100% invested in those types of options.

Taylor suspects plan sponsors are taking some comfort that their employees are invested in age-appropriate allocations. “Ten, 12 years ago, we used to see many more people that had extreme allocations, where they were either 100% equity or 0% equity,” she says. “We don’t really see that as much anymore.”

Fidelity has been emphasizing to plan participants that 401(k) plans are a long-term investment and stressing, especially to younger participants, that if mutual fund prices fall it could present a good buying opportunity, she says.

Managing Anxiety

Jania Stout, a managing director and co-founder of Fiduciary Plan Advisors, an Owings Mills, Md.-based independent team within HighTower, finds plan sponsors are growing increasingly anxious about the sustainability of the bull market. At committee meetings, they’re “at the edge of their seat wondering when is this going to stop, when is the floor going to come out from under us,” she says.