The TSP I Fund fell 60.9% and took 4.5 years to get back

The TSP I Fund closed at $66.3260 on 9 September 2026, up 8.47% a year since the plan restated every fund to $10.00 on 31 May 2003. That record includes a fall of 60.9% between October 2007 and March 2009, the deepest of any fund in the plan, followed by 1,627 days below the old peak. This page updates daily from the plan's own price file.

The fund tracks the MSCI ACWI IMI ex USA ex China ex Hong Kong Index, which tsp.gov reported held over 5,000 stocks across 44 countries as of 31 December 2025, 21 of them developed markets and 23 emerging. China and Hong Kong sit outside that benchmark by construction, so a participant who assumes the international fund gives them exposure to the world's second largest equity market does not have it, and nothing on a quarterly statement would tell them.

The plan does not run the money itself. tsp.gov names BlackRock Institutional Trust Company and State Street Global Advisors Trust Company as the managers, and the fund's performance is judged on how closely it matches the index rather than on whether the index was the right one to pick. That distinction matters more here than in the other funds, because the Board has changed which international index the I Fund follows during the life of the price series on this page.

The share price peaked at $26.31 on 31 October 2007 and bottomed at $10.29 on 9 March 2009, a fall of 60.9% that took roughly 2.6 times the trough value just to get back to level. It did not close above the old peak until 8 May 2014, which is 1,627 days, the longest recovery of the 3 stock funds and 2.0 times what the S Fund needed.

That asymmetry is the arithmetic nobody enjoys. A fall of 60.9% needs a gain of 156% to get back to even, which is why the depth of a drawdown and the length of the recovery are not two separate facts. For a participant still contributing, those 4.5 years bought shares at prices they would otherwise never have seen. For one drawing income, the same years sold them.

Over 23 years the I Fund compounded at 8.46% a year against gold's 11.52%, so a share that bought 0.0277 of an ounce at the start buys 0.0145 now. Measured in metal it has spent 56 of 280 months at or above its 2003 level, which is 20% of them and the weakest showing of the three stock funds.

The reason to be careful with that comparison is that both sides of it move with the same thing. tsp.gov names currency risk in the I Fund's own risk description, because a falling dollar converts the same foreign shares into more dollars, and gold is priced in dollars for the same reason it rises when they buy less. A reader treating a move from the I Fund into metal as diversification may be doubling a single position rather than spreading it. What the dollar has actually done, and what gold did alongside it, is on real interest rates and gold.

The 0.048% total for 2025 splits into 0.033% of net administration and 0.015% paid to the managers, checked against tsp.gov on 10 September 2026. On $100,000 that is $48 a year, against $35 for the C Fund, and the gap between the two is smaller than the rounding on most retail fund charges.

A self-directed IRA holding metal charges a custodian fee and a depository storage fee, commonly $300 a year together whatever the balance. On the same $100,000 that is roughly 6 times the I Fund's charge, before the premium over spot on the first purchase. The full comparison is on what a gold IRA actually costs.