Glide path

Glide path — the planned migration of portfolio weights toward the guaranteed layer as the money’s use date approaches (target-date retirement funds are a glide path in a wrapper). At accumulation stage the glide is mostly flat, but the trigger belongs in the IPS anyway: money needed within ~2 years — Level 3’s property down payment, most concretely — migrates out of equities and into maturity-matched rungs. It’s the structural defense against sequence-of-returns risk: you can’t control when crashes come, but you can control whether near-term money is exposed to them.

First used in: 2.6 · Portfolio construction