Standard Life Sterling Fund

MikeJones_2

For your information. This headline appeared in Money Marketing (19/01/2009):

- Standard Life to remediate some pension sterling fund investors

Hope that helps some readers of this thread.

Mike

I work in the field of Pension Education and Pension Guidance in the UK. I am a member of the Specialist Pensions Forum as well as being a Voluntary Adviser for The Pensions Advisory Service. I work with scheme members, employers, trustees, scheme administrators and advisers on most things to do with employer sponsored pension schemes. The views expressed by me in this thread are my personal opinions. You should seek professional advice from an appropriately experienced and qualified adviser. I am not an IFA.

dunstonh

Who is to say that another 5% is not coming next week?

Who is to say a 5% reversal is not coming next week? (playing devils advocate here )

Royston37

wonderman wrote: »

This looks a lot more like I would expect a cash fund to be.

I am not quite sure how SL arrived at a 5% mark down - they could equally have decided to mark these assets down to zero and put a 40% hit on the fund. Who is to say that another 5% is not coming next week?

The Property Fund took 2 large hits, after many small incremental movements. Basically, a bunch of people sit around a table and say OK, from tomorrow, we will say this is worth x% less. Going on this past performance of the Property Fund, it is not unreasonable to think the same thing could happen to the Sterling Fund. The link to the article about remediation says that it will apply to customers between December 23 2008 and January 13 2009. Not exactly a large window.

bob_a_builder

Why such a small remediation window, if they 'rushed' out the managed cash fund back in October, it seems like they where aware much earlier than Dec 23

wonderman

dunstonh wrote: »

Who is to say a 5% reversal is not coming next week? (playing devils advocate here )

Yeah right and the credit crunch will all be fixed by next week and there will be demand for bundled up mortgages called asset based securities......maybe in 5 to 10 years but not next week. Sorry I place my bet the other way and would be a seller of this fund.

wonderman

bob_a_builder wrote: »

Why such a small remediation window, if they 'rushed' out the managed cash fund back in October, it seems like they where aware much earlier than Dec 23

Answer - to cap their liabilities to virtually zero - I bet they have already looked at the number of trades in this period and worked out it is about £100 total compensation er I mean remediation. They really are a bunch of incompetent jerks if they are claiming that they did NOT know there was a problem with the valuation of mortgage backed securities before 23 December - I mean what planet are they living on?

bob_a_builder

to cap their liabilities to virtually zero

rather what I thought.

Who should we write to to complain about this - makes sense we to all write to same people.

Is there no equivelent of the class action in the uk ?

dunstonh

Who should we write to to complain about this - makes sense we to all write to same people.

Standard Life need to be the first option to complain. However, it is worth writing to the FSA. Whilst the FSA will not investigate individual complaints, they will investigate issues that are considered to have a wider impact than one individual. Once they have seen dozens of letters on this subject, it should register with them that there is a problem that they need to look at.

Myrmidon_J

Apparently, the reason for the mammoth reduction being applied on one day (and not, as might have been expected, on a daily basis - resulting in the same fall in value, but spread out over a manageable timescale) is that Standard Life has adopted a different method of valuing the 'toxic' assets.

I would have thought that the FSA would require all companies to value assets in the same fashion (using the same model). It seems illogical that two investors could hold the same underlying assets in two separate funds and receive a completely different surrender value...

TCF?

shaunrc

Hi

My suggestion is that we all write to the same person if we wish to complain. I have written to the person who wrote to us as at least he is aware of the position. If John Gill gets a lot of letters hopefully it will make him think. His title after all is Managing Director Customer Services.