News & updates

News & Updates

Forecasting the long term

Other than the US, major equity regions are priced below their historic trends for cumulative real total returns. This implies that the popular narrative of slower economic growth is to some extent discounted in prices already. But economic growth is anyway not the main driver of long-term real returns from equity indices. We examine what else might validate a more naive forecasting approach.

Investing to secure defined outcomes

Final-salary pension transfers tell us a lot about the wider need for customised investment solutions, goal-based and outcomes-driven, to replace standardised portfolio types. Failure of conventional solutions Defined Benefit (DB) transfers, where a known, secure real...

The coronavirus risk premium

Equities are very cheap. Real risk free rates are exceptionally negative. The real-terms risk premium is higher than at typical bear market lows. That's what a pandemic can do at a time when risk free rates are still represssed by the monetary response to the credit...

The economic impacts of coronavirus

This email to clients updated our earlier information on 21st March on the impacts of coronavirus on our modelling of real spending outcomes for their spending plans. This takes into account the extraordinary scale of governments' intervention in economies,...

Coronavirus update: email to clients

This is how we updated our discretionary portfolio-management clients (by email) on the impacts of coronavirus on their goal-based portfolios. This was before the lockdown and before the full scale of the Government's intervention in the economy was known but after...

Why the FCA is wrong about DB pension transfers

We show here our opening comments as part of a detailed response to the FCA to its proposed ban on contingent fees for advising on a transfer of a Defined Benefit (DB) pension to a personal pension. You can read our response to CP19/25 in full . This follows a number...

Flat(ter) fees are optimal

Editor's note: In this article in 2019 we set out the reasoning behind a fee schedule for discretionary portfolio management combining an asset-based element with a flat fee varying only as a function of the nature of the goal and our quantitative solution to the...

What can be learned from our DB transfer history?

The scale of our transfer activity is not typical (just 19 transfers in 2 years) but the transfer logic and the numbers applicable to it are perfectly representative. The data is a direct challenge to critics of transfers in principle, or even in general, derived as...