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: 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
Reading Time: 2 minutes We see literally hundreds of fund managers and investment strategies a year; which do we think are most likely to be successful in 2015? We really see three important things to focus on: risk, diversification, and freedom. Let’s take each of those in turn. Risk. This might sound obvious, but as we see it, the … More Which Investment Strategies Will Thrive in 2015 ?
Reading Time: 1 minute Data from the Pension Protection Fund as of March 2015 shows that while the assets of UK pension funds have risen in value by 12% over the last year, falling yields have driven a fall in funding ratio of 13%. The aggregate deficit stands at £292bn (this is down slightly from a recent high of … More UK Pension funding ratio falls 13% in a year as yield swings continue
Reading Time: 2 minutes Last month I reported on the record deficit level of UK DB pension funds (as reported by the PPF 7800 index). In spite of reasonable asset returns in recent years, the recent large falls in long dated yields had driven liabilities higher (nearly doubling in 5 years). In February the volatility in long dated yields continued, although … More INFOGRAPHIC: UK DB Pension Deficits Remain Elevated Amid Volatile Yields
