Those with whom I’ve had the most pleasant conversations in recent weeks have been the 30% or so of our clients invested in ethical, or, as we should now say, ethical, sustainable and positive impact funds. They’re often braced for bad news, yet I’m able to tell them that they are, in fact, better off than they were last year, in many cases quite significantly. Avoiding companies that do harm and picking those that do good stuff has to be the way forward; Covid seems to have reinforced this. And guess what, a bandwagon has appeared over the horizon, with a stream of fund managers, a tad belatedly, jumping on board. Which, I guess, has to be a good thing.
“Record year for annuity sales driven by advisers”
I was asked this week whether annuities are now ‘a good investment’. They’ve been recommended very rarely in recent years, since ‘pension freedoms’ allowed pretty much unlimited drawdown on pension funds and anything left to be passed on to beneficiaries free of Inheritance Tax.