Reading Time: 2 minutes Body-Mass Index (BMI) can be helpful in giving an indication of whether someone is overweight, at risk of developing negative health effects and can give a clear call-to-action to make changes from a dietary or exercise perspective. However, take BMI to extremes and you end up concluding that the Rock, and at least half of … More All Models are Wrong but Some are Useful
Reading Time: 1 minute There is an important concept in software development called Technical Debt. Technical debt is incurred whenever a quick fix is implemented that solves a problem but not in the most long-term optimal way form the perspective of the whole system. When you are building something fast, trying to get it working and ship it out, … More Technical Debt
Reading Time: 2 minutes I had the pleasure of being invited to present to actuarial students and local professionals at Queens’ University in Belfast on the subject of current issues in investment, and careers in investment consulting. I took the opportunity to give an overview of the global asset owner universe, talk through the portfolios of some of the … More An Evening with Actuaries in Belfast
Reading Time: 2 minutes A strange thought occurred to me the other day, hear me out on this for two seconds. Perhaps Defined Benefit Pensions are showing us a way forward in the future? I had just finished reading the excellent Stories from 2045, which as I summarise here contains many angles on the theme of managing (successfully or … More Universal Basic Income is DB v2.0
Reading Time: 1 minute I recently posted the following to Linkedin and it received over 20,000 views and over 250 likes. There are a lot of correlation geeks out there! I think it also shows the appeal of dynamic data visualisations, and I think its a shame that standard packages such as excel do no cater to this. Dynamic … More A Lot of Love for Correlation!
Reading Time: 5 minutes My beachside reading on the recent winter trip to Australia was the excellent “The Undoing Project” by Michael Lewis. Obviously when it comes to Michael Lewis expectations are high, both for the quality of the writing and depth of the research behind it. This is no exception. Some of the specific elements are familiar but … More Books – The Undoing Project
Reading Time: 2 minutes My most-read blog posts of 2016 were: 1. Why Anthony Hilton is wrong about DB pensions This post, responding to the misguided (in my view) viewpoints of London Evening Standard journalist Anthony Hilton in September garnered by far the most views of any of my blogs this year (around 1400 views). An extended version of … More 2016’s Most Popular
Reading Time: 4 minutes UK pension funds have been through a hell of a ride over the last 10 years, and more. changes in regulation, longevity, interest rates, equity markets and the changing fortunes of sponsoring companies have all contributed to making the UK pension industry a tricky place. But are the lessons learnt relevant to other investors, particularly Sovereign … More Five lessons from UK Pensions for SWFs and Others
Reading Time: 1 minute The two charts below (data sourced from the PPF website) really tell you everything you need to know about risk management of UK pension funds over the last 10 years. Assets have grown steadily from c£700bn to c £1.3trn, although admittedly a very large part of this (possibly all of it) is due to contributions. … More A Decade of UK Pension Risk Management in 2 Charts
Reading Time: 2 minutes As the UK Liability Driven Investing (LDI) market has grown over the last decade the KPMG LDI Survey “Navigating the LDI Market” has become a really useful tool for understanding the growth of the market at a high level and who the major players are from an asset management perspective. The latest version of the survey, … More LDI Continues to Thrive – 5 Takeaways from the KPMG Survey
