This series’ distinctive approach to asset allocation and portfolio construction, underpinned by keen attention to portfolio objectives and deep asset-class research, supports a High Process rating.
This series benefits from the full breadth of the team’s multi-asset capabilities, leading to thoughtfully built portfolios. Management allocates the portfolios by objectives rather than simply scaling the stock/bond split across each portfolio in the series. The oversight committee assigns assets to categories such as “growth” (growth stocks) and “income” (bonds). The team’s multi-asset research enriches this approach. In recent years, the team has explored the role fixed income plays in a portfolio, spawning four new lenses for its proprietary portfolio optimizer tool. It has also examined different types of dividend-paying companies, helping diversify exposures.
The managers review each portfolio at least annually and lean on the underlying strategies to drive shorter-term shifts, playing to the firm’s strength of bottom-up analysis. They prefer flexible strategies like American Funds American Balanced, which can opportunistically tilt between equity and fixed income, and American Funds Multi-Sector Income, which can nimbly invest across credit sectors, including high-yield and emerging-market debt.
While these portfolios are connected by a similar growth-and-income objective, management pays individual attention to each portfolio and its objectives. Updates made to the portfolios in April 2026 exhibit management’s thoughtful positioning and asymmetric exposures. For example, the team modestly increased exposure to non-US stocks and bonds across the series, reflecting a desire for greater global diversification and a view that the US dollar could weaken further. These moves were among several well-researched, portfolio-specific adjustments.
In the more aggressive Growth and Income and Moderate Growth and Income portfolios, the team added new allocations to emerging-market stock fund American Funds New World, at 3% and 2%, respectively. The team also added American Funds Emerging Markets Bond Fund at a 2% weighting to each, giving both portfolios dedicated emerging-market exposure.
In the Conservative Growth and Income and Conservative Income and Growth portfolios, the team refrained from adding dedicated emerging-market stock exposure, instead raising the weighting of American Funds Capital World Growth and Income Fund, a core global stock fund, by two percentage points in each, to 9% and 7%, respectively. The team already held American Funds Emerging Markets Bond Fund in these portfolios and increased that stake by 1 percentage point, to 4% and 3%, respectively.
The team lowered allocations to US-focused funds to accommodate these additions, such as American Funds Growth Fund of America in the Growth and Income portfolio, American Balanced in Moderate Growth and Income, and American Mutual in the two more conservative portfolios.