Treasury gilt yields have risen to touch 6% at the 20-to-30-year tenor. That is more than the discount rate for most LGPS funds. The real yield on index-linked gilts is 2.5%, so investors can lock in that yield while getting complete certainty on future cashflows as well as full mitigation against inflation. Both those propositions must be attractive to any open Defined Benefits (“DB”) Scheme, whether active or not. But while some LGPS funds are beginning to raise weighti

UPCOMING EVENTS PAST EVENTS 6 October 2026 - William was a speaker at the LGPS Private Markets Forum in Birmingham. 9-11 September 2026 - William attended and chaired the LGPS Stream at the LGC Investment & Pensions Summit. 29-30 June 2026 - William attended the DG Publishing's LAPF Stategic Investment Forum. 5-6 May 2026 - William attended the LGPS Pooling Symposium. 19-20 March 2026 - William was a speaker at the LGC Investment Seminar at Carden Park. 25 February 2026 - Wi

I make no apology for writing an article on bond yields only six weeks after I last wrote on this subject. The recent rise and the impact of higher yields on governments’ cost of borrowing has now made the headlines of even the lay press, often in apocalyptic phrasing. Yields are rising A lot has happened since I last wrote. By rising to the highest yield levels for nearly 30 years bond markets have given the kind of unintermediated signal which the Chair of the Federal Res

What is the seminal question for investors? Over the past 200 years, it has always come back to the government bond markets. If investors lose confidence in a currency or a government’s fiscal policy and impose too high a refinancing cost, it either has to come to heel or take more dramatic action such as help from the IMF or some form of default. Bond-markets vs politicians That is why Bill Clinton’s adviser, James Carville, famously said he’d like to be reincarnated as th

This article was originally published on Room 151's website here. I discuss why the pools' multi-manager equity funds have under-performed the index benchmarks and make some suggestions. Pool multi-manager funds have not delivered performance Exposure to equities is at the core of any open active pension scheme such as the LGPS because they deliver growth. Most of the six LGPS pools therefore offer (or will) an actively managed multi-manager equity sub-fund. Some, such as

Three months ago, I wrote an article suggesting we were close to a major market top. I made two points: the historical experience of low or negative market returns from such an extreme level of valuations, and expectations of a different and less market-friendly monetary policy under Chairman Warsh. With hindsight my timing was clearly wrong, as markets promptly rose by 10% to new highs. The first-quarter earnings season was much stronger than expected, which helped to jus