The Dublin Roadshow: Accessing Investment Returns for Pension Funds

Speakers

• Barnaby Wiener Portfolio Manager

  Barnaby Wiener is an investment officer of MFS Investment Management® (MFS®) and portfolio manager of MFS® Prudent Wealth Fund, MFS® Prudent Capital Fund and MFS® Prudent Investor Fund. He also serves as a portfolio manager on MFS® Managed Wealth Fund, an alternative strategy run by a committee of the firm’s portfolio managers. He is based in MFS’ London office.

  Barnaby joined the firm as a research analyst in 1998. Previously, he was an equity research analyst at Merrill Lynch. Prior to that, he served as an equity research analyst at Crédit Lyonnais and as a captain in the British Army.

  He is a graduate of Ampleforth College and Oxford University.

  Our portfolio managers are supported by our entire team of investment professionals in nine worldwide offices. The team employs a proprietary investment process to build better insights for our clients. The core principles of our approach are integrated research, global collaboration and active risk management.

• Eddie Hobbs

  Eddie Hobbs is a pensioner trustee, financial advisor and writer. He presented RTE’s Rip Off Republic landmark TV series and the award winning Show Me The Money series and has written several best sellers on financial topics. His most recent book, The Pivot released last December for Jack & Jill Children’s Charity for whom he is patron deals with excess global debt. He is credited with collapsing the Endowment Mortgage market in the early 90’s, for campaigning successfully under Competition rules for financial consumer disclosure rights enacted in Insurance Act 2000 and for setting price benchmarks for the five year Government Special Savings Incentive Accounts (SSIA.

• James Lindsay

  James Lindsay is Head of UK & Ireland Institutional Business at MFS.

  James joined MFS in 2007 from Columbia Threadneedle Investments where he held the roles of Institutional Sales Manager and Head of Consultant Relationships. He previously spent four years as Institutional Marketing Executive at Fidelity Investments.

  James earned a BA (Hons) from Nottingham Business School and also holds the Investment Management Certificate (IMC) from CFA UK.

Program

1. 9:00 AM Registrations, Breakfast and Networking

2. 9:15 AM The Themes of Risk and Return - Stuart Breyer, CEO, mallowstreet

   An update on some of the relevant current themes on mallowstreet.com, and an open discussion on how pension funds should be measuring, monitoring, and hedging risk.

3. 9:30 AM Session I: Alternatives to Diversified Growth Funds (DGFs) - James Lindsay and Barnaby Wiener | MFS Investment Management

   Equity market returns with half the volatility? Sounds too good to be true? It was, is and always will be. The blame is often laid at feet of the DGF managers for making such promises to begin with. But there is a deeper issue here - the investment world is riddled with Principal-agent conflicts. Principals want to protect their capital and agents want to protect their jobs. We overuse benchmarks that serve the practitioner (agent) but not the client (principal). We are encouraged to measure performance over the short term and allowed to claim success if “only” down '40%' when the benchmark is 50%. We know that – through the “miracle” of compounding - if you grow at 7% per annum for ten years you double your money. However, lose 50% and you need to double your money just to break even. And yet the entire industry is incentivised to fully invest clients' money at all costs. We believe that there is another way. The discussion will focus on what an investment portfolio looks like when capital preservation is just as important an objective as capital growth.

4. 10:25 AM Tea, Coffee and Networking

5. 10:50 AM Session II: The Context of the Dublin Pensions Market - Eddie Hobbs, Independent Advisor

   Solving the retirement dilemma isn’t merely a question of addressing a structural or economic question in isolation but requires addressing deeply political questions that go to the heart of the Irish version of crony capitalism and its deep state. We must face the hard question about why Ireland’s pension system is on course to fail over half its working population and under-deliver for many of the remainder. The truth is that public sector contracts and a shrunken number of fully funded DB schemes are all that remain of pensions. The rest is not a pensions industry but savings industry with a tax break on a pot of assets which are on the front line for appropriation of capital during State financial crises. Ireland has a two-tier pensions system between the insiders and outsiders, the latter bailing out the former through tax transfers. This presentation will investigate a number of these questions and offer some potentially radical solutions to this growing problem.

6. 11:40 AM Making the most of your membership & Close

   Stuart Breyer, CEO, mallowstreet

7. 12:00 PM Lunch and networking

8. 12:45 PM End