James Johnsen: The importance of an active pension

It may not have felt like it at the time, but the past nine years have been a golden era for investors. Bond and equity markets have risen steadily and people have been handsomely rewarded for taking risk. The problem is that people can be seduced into assuming that the future will be like the past. This is not just an assumption made by novice investors; it is endemic in the way portfolios are constructed. In a world where the future looks exactly the same as the past, it is possible to simply set an asset allocation and, with only occasional rebalancing, ignore it for twenty or thir...