Personal pensions: latest results
The state of the economy has hit returns on all types of personal pensions. It's not all doom and gloom however. Janet Walford OBE finds some good news despite the gloom
Over 10 years, the Skandia fund linked to Gartmore's China fund in the Asia Pacific excluding Japan sector is in top slot with a return of £32,809, AGR 12.6%. However, this is £15,169 down on the same fund only five months ago, at £47,978, representing a fall of almost 32%.
Worst return over 10 years came from the same Skandia fund mentioned above, linked to Invesco/Perpetual's US Equity fund, which turned £10,000 into £5,056 over 10 years.
Over 15 years the drop in payout is even more dramatic. Here the top fund is the Skandia fund linked to Fidelity Europe excluding UK. Last October it returned a whopping £91,134, AGR 15.9%. Just five months later and this return is down to £59,072, a drop of £32,062, which is 35%.
Worst performing single contribution fund is Guardian's Asia Pacific including Japan fund, which turned £10,000 into £5,559 over the past 15 years.
5 star awards
As usual, we have made 5 star awards to the best unit linked plans in our survey (not including with profits plans). To quality for a 5 star award, companies must meet the following criteria: 50% or more of their regular or single contribution actual unit linked 5 and 10 year results must be above average, which must include the principal managed fund over the past 5 years. In addition, plans taken out today must have charges either equal to or lower than stakeholder charges. As usual, we would ask readers to bear in mind the following caveats with regard to these 5 star awards:
Caveats: The assessment of 5 star awards is based on actual performance of unit linked plans, after all charges that are borne by the pension planholder have been taken into account, for individual pensions becoming payable on 1 January 2009, relating to a contribution of £200 pm gross or a single contribution of £10,000 gross over the past 5 and 10 years for the range of ages stated in the Tables. As such, the 5 star awards list may well look different for other contribution levels, other retirement ages and other performance dates.
Also, some readers may place greater emphasis on the relative importance of the managed fund's performance rather than the whole range of funds, some of which are highly specialised and therefore more volatile, or pick a provider or fund manager because it has especially strong investment performance in a particular sector, and use that company or manager for part of the investment only.
Our 5 star awards list, therefore, provides a useful starting point to selection; service record, strength of provider, outlet for purchase, future servicing, range of outside fund managers on offer and so on, also need to be taken into account in the final selection. Much will depend on attitudes to risk and also attitudes to loss. Recent performance (over the past year or so, for example) should also be checked. Every issue of Money Management lists performance of all pension funds for one month onwards, to help with this, and statistics are updated daily on our website at FTadviser.com.
