Small rant, not sure if others will relate or not. I'm really annoyed with my company (in the Fortune 500) that REQUIRES company matched funds in a 401k to be directed to company shares. You have to manually reallocate them into a diversified option (e.g. an index fund). It means that even if I am going in there and doing it every two weeks (paycheck period), I am constantly buying/selling their damn stock and forced into a timing scenario.
I had looked at it today and forgot I had $1,200 in there. Annualized returns for those funds is -5%. Compared with my index fund which for the year was 16%. People complain about fees, but when you add up those difference in returns it absolutely blows any type of fee out of the water in terms of cost to the employee/investor.
Anyways - extremely annoyed and nobody in "real life" would really care about this type of thing. It doesn't even seem like it should be legal. Almost like you are boosting your own stock through investing company money into it in the way of employee retirement. Guaranteed that a huge portion of the company doesn't even reallocate or realize that a large amount of their default funding goes directly into one company. And I don't care how much you love your company - not being diversified is a huge risk.
Edit: PLUS, I had taken out a 401k loan for a home purchase, and the funds were *originally* all in an index fund. Now as I pay it back, the funds are split - partially into my index fund and now forced into part of the company funds again. So nice of them.
Rant off...