News & updates
News & Updates
The love/hate thing with annuities
New consumer research shows 79% of retirees want a guaranteed income for life but only 10% expect to buy an annuity. An annuity guarantees an income for life. Is this plain ignorance or a general unresolved skittishness? We plump for skittishness. And we think it...
FCA tightens the screw on transfers
Our submission to the FCA's latest consultation on DB pension transfers (CP18/07) is . The new proposals are contentious and potentially far more significant than any before. Our general observation is that this makes the perfect the enemy of the good. It is arguable...
Is a third of all transfer advice unsuitable?
That's what the FCA is telling us from the evidence of its file searches. This is shocking - if it's true. We would like to understand better what's really going on. So should financial journalists. Less than one fifth of transfers have been suitable, according to the...
FCA decisions on DB transfer advice
Today's FCA policy statement following its consultation on advice on pension transfers shows it has listened to some of the main objections to its proposals for strengthening a clearly fragile advice process but it will leave unsatisfied objections from both opponents...
CDC at HOC: there are none so blind…
For two days last week the The House of Commons Work and Pensions Select Committee heard evidence on the hybrid pension arrangement called Collective Defined Contribution or CDC. They saw what they needed to see but heard only what they wanted to hear. I hope this...
6 things you need to know about an equity index
An equity index for a single market is 'passive' in name only, having Darwinian adaptive dynamics It doesn't represent all of a country's company sector or economy But it is apparently itself a 'system': mean reverting slowly around fairly stable growth trends...
Market timing and the old rogue, momentum
The FT's John Authers is a long-standing sceptic about market timing. But in his Long View column on 22nd February he sings the praises of an approach that sounded very much like ours, making adjustments to weights in different markets as a function of new...
What’s happening to stock/bond correlations?
At the heart of the principle of 'balanced' management is the presumption of a negative - or at worst low - correlation between equities and bonds, particularly at times of large falls in equity prices. Though we have now experienced a reversal in equities, is it...
Fowler Drew differs from typical investment firms who seek ‘alpha’ for alpha’s sake, instead harvesting low-cost ‘beta’, building towards target outcomes that clients get to define. Their assumptions about how markets behave seem sensible and plausible to this non-expert client. The focus on outcomes helps us to understand what we are doing and why. It’s self-contained, neat and tidy and very suitable for busy lives.