This quarter for our Ohio 529s they provided supplemental plan information. The short version is fund information is on a new website that they update monthly.
The site compares each offering to a benchmark, but there isn't a lot of clarity to what the benchmark is or how it was decided. In fact the bench mark is different depending on what fund you invest in.
For example:
* 2030/2031 Vanguard target
* Actual performance is -0.81% YTD (4/17)
* Published performance 0.81% YTD (3/31) and 3.73% Performance
* Benchmark is 1.06% YTD (3/31) and 3.81% 3-Year Performance
* 2030 Advantage Fund
* Published performance is 1.78% YTD (3/31) and 3.36% 3-Year Performance
* Benchmark is 1.86% YTD (3/31) and 2.92% 3-Year Performance
Of course digging in deeper it looks like for the 2030 Advantage fund 65% of it is invested in fixed income investments or short term reserved, it it is outperforming the Vanguard option in a bad market, but the reality is those investors are likely going to miss out when the market swings the other way, and possibly at higher expense ratios...
Which brings me to the big problem I have with this. They no longer are separating out expense ratios and fees, so it's not clear how an investors performance is impacted, short term the performance may have been 1.78% on their in house offering, but what was given up in expenses?
Contrast all of this to Fidelity (which I know is getting a lot of flack lately for other reasons), the have 3 fund offerings, which all are Fidelity funds so at least I know what they are invested in (although all three underperform both the Vanguard and Advantage offerings), they all have their expense ratios and fund managers listed, and they all use the same benchmark so they are easily comparable.
Or similarly Vanguard's offering where I can see the exact funds the offering uses for the target funds (which appear to be the same as the ones Ohio uses since the performance is the same) and the expense ratio.
Hell, even JPMorgan Chase's 529 (which performs the worst out of the bunch with a high expense ratio) publishes this information.
Maybe I'm overreacting, because the funds are still performing, but it seems like someone is going through a lot of work to obfuscate something that was exceptionally transparent before.