Transferring Retirement Accounts: Why Timing Your Move to Fidelity or Schwab Won’t Beat the Market
Key takeaways
- Henske s reframe is worth absorbing before you ever click submit on an ACAT request.
- SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY) is up 8.86% year to date and 26.49% over the past year, with market volatility measured by the VIX ranging from 13.47 to 31.05 over recent months.
- The timing of retirement account transfers between custodians does not meaningfully affect long-term investment returns since investors are equally likely to miss down days as up days during the transfer window.
Transferring Retirement Accounts: Why Timing Your Move to Fidelity or Schwab Won’t Beat the Market Jeremy Phillips Mon, May 18, 2026 at 6:43 AM GMT+7 3 min read SPY Transferring a retirement account between custodians is one of those mundane logistical tasks that triggers outsized emotional reactions. A caller named D recently phoned in to Talking Real Money with exactly that anxiety, telling host Tom Henske that "recently there was a big up day in the market and I had put in a ACAT transfer request from TIAA to Fidelity, and it didn t go through," and admitting "I know logically it shouldn t make any difference outside of the time that the money would be out of the market, but it made me nervous."
Henske s reframe is worth absorbing before you ever click submit on an ACAT request.
SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY) is up 8.86% year to date and 26.49% over the past year, with market volatility measured by the VIX ranging from 13.47 to 31.05 over recent months.