What is the price for risk?

"It is a day in the sun for asset allocators," said Curt Custard, UBS's head of global investment solutions, as his group announced the launch of a multi-asset product for the DB pension market last week.

UBS’s Diversified Return Fund (DRF) aims to produce equity-like returns from a multi-asset portfolio, but for schemes that do not have the risk appetite for full equity-like volatility. It is essentially the same proposition multi-manager and multi-asset portfolios offer to the retail market and, with continued uncertainty in the markets, the appeal of such strategies is clear. Custard argues we have moved from the period of “great moderation” – falling interest rates, low inflation, and rising asset prices to the “new norm”. Although, as he says, no-one is quite sure what the new...