Welcome to a cautious world

The seven-year qualifying schedule of the actuary is more than most people in the City can stomach. It may make you an expert at working out morbidity or mortality tables, but it is clear to me that it does not make you a great investor. The life industry has for years entrusted your clients" money and my own to a with-profits manager whose primary concern is their asset/liability model rather than what is good for the investor. In the growth years of the stock market in the 1980s and 1990s, 'smoothing" was used by the life companies to bank some of the excess growth and keep it to one...