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Suppose a 401(k) contains mutual fund investments and is linked to a brokerage account holding various stocks, ETFs, mutual funds, etc.
What happens to those investments should the 401(k) be rolled over into another retirement account, be it another 401(k) or an IRA? Are the different investments simply "cut and pasted", or are they liquidated at market price and the resulting cash is credited into the new account?
It is very uncommon that stocks would be directly transferred from a 401(k) to an IRA or another company's 401(k) during a rollover.
Usually the stocks are converted to cash at the current market price, and the cash is deposited in the new account where you'll need to re-invest it.
If you want to roll-over without cashing in the funds ("in kind" rollover), SOMETIMES you can do this if you do the rollover out of the company 401(k) to account with the same provider that the company used (e.g. Fidelity, Vanguard, etc.)
To even have a chance to pull this off you need to talk to your plan administrator and the provider directly. Even then they may not always let you do this.
