Equity pricing may drive improved with-profits

Although the Pru stresses it is not making a wholesale move back into equity investment, the life assurer says it has invested slightly more in equities over recent months. Moreover, its strategy of investing in emerging and “peripheral” market equities appears to have helped its investment returns over the long-term when many other companies have been nervous about badly performing sectors. Martin Brooks, portfolio manager of the Prudential with-profits life fund, says having reduced the company’s with-profits equity weighting at the end of the 1990s, Prudential has recently increase...