Hopefully this isn't too long and rambling, but here goes. My employer offers a 401k with a 4% match, so I'm throwing in 4% to take advantage of the free money. Previously I was contributing the max allowed to take advantage of the tax writeoff (which I've come to realize isn't actually the end-all great deal it's advertised as). This year I scaled back contributing directly to the 401k and contribute the max to my employers stock purchase program (I get a 15% match and set up my account so I can trade covered calls against them). My plan is to trade covered calls and as I'm assigned, I can transfer this money out to my "real" brokerage accounts. The problem (as with most 401ks) is what to do with the money already in the 401k. I've got a decent (for me) amount tied up in the 401k. It's with a standard big name brokerage (i.e: they offer about 15 different mutual funds) so you can't really do much of anything worthwhile with it. I changed jobs previously, so I was able to roll my old 401k in to IRAs with TOS/IB that allow me to actually trade the things I want to. I like the job I'm in, so (barring unfortunate events), I plan on being here awhile. Anybody else have this problem and where do you allocate it? Right now I'm 100% in cash in the 401k, but have been considering just market timing one of the mutual funds (something like FCNTX which at least tracks SPY, so I can use that as an intraday proxy to give me a heads up on entry/exit signals for the day). Any thoughts/ideas? Thanks for your input. P.S: As an aside, does anybody else wretch when seeing statements like "Crisis-Behaviour: Stay-The-Course investors move ahead of panic sellers" posted on your broker website homepage?