To date, investment risk has largely been the Cinderella of Defined Contribution (DC) investment default design – at least in the growth phase of the journey – with its more glamorous sister, investment return, tending to steal the limelight. But all this has changed in the wake of the recent financial market turmoil. Investment risk is now fast becoming the belle of the ball. Part of the reason behind this relative neglect of investment risk is the fact that it has not really been fully understood or defined in an appropriate way for DC savings. Taking a long-term, perhaps over 30–40 years, view and modelling the level and variability of outcomes has generally always suggested that the price of managing risk has always been too great for the benefit that it brings. Lifestyling has traditionally been the medicine for dealing with investment risk, which is fine in the run up to retirement, although lifestyle programmes and glide-path designs can be greatly improved where the additional complexity can outweigh the operational cost that it brings. Traditionally, however, lifestyling has done little to manage risk for those members who are not in this pre-retirement phase of their life. In this short opinion piece, we go back to basics and redefine investment risk in a DC context, suggesting new DC-specific measures to help us get a handle on investment risk, and exploring how DC plan fiduciaries can assess how much risk should be built into a default investment programme and how a defaulting member's exposure to that risk can be more effectively managed over their DC journey. We hypothecate that DC plan fiduciaries have a vital role to play and that they need to subtly, but quite fundamentally change the way that they approach the setting of their default investment strategy – focusing more on understanding their membership, its retirement outcome objectives, its investment return needs and its investment risk tolerances, as well as focusing more on managing the default programme more proactively against some clear strategic objectives.