In some ways, the second most popular post on my blog in 2025 was my favorite – and objectively likely my “best” – post of the year, in any venue. It hit early and accurately, and provided actionable advice to an at-risk population, namely employers who sponsor 401(k) plans and the fiduciaries who operate them.

The subject? The sudden gold rush on the part of both the presidential administration and Wall Street to open up 401(k) plan investment menus to private equity investments and other so-called alternative investments.

Pretty quickly after that issue breached the surface, I wrote a post that I called a cheat sheet for plan sponsors and fiduciaries on how to protect themselves in the face of the increasing pressure to allow such investments into their plans. The cheat sheet only required six steps by employers and fiduciaries to protect themselves, not ten or twenty or some long list of technical actions. This is because prudent, defensible conduct – and not perfection – is what plan sponsors and fiduciaries need to engage in to protect themselves from liability, and those six steps were (and remain) enough to demonstrate that type of conduct in this context.

The post was “Best Practices for ERISA Plan Sponsors and Fiduciaries in a Changing World: A Cheat Sheet for Deciding Whether to Add Private Equity or Other Alternative Investments to Plans,” and you can find it here.

In some ways, I wish it had landed at number one in the countdown of my most popular posts of 2025 and, knowing my readership, I am a little surprised it didn’t.

But the single most popular post of 2025 legitimately was a viral post, and I can’t argue with its numbers. Stay tuned to the countdown for a few days, at which point we will unveil my single most popular post of the year gone by.