Lost value

bazman1955

The value of my personal pension has dropped 25% in 3 months

Is there any recourse to the pension company?

MEM62

What do you think they have done wrong?  

Grumpy_chap

bazman1955 said:

The value of my personal pension has dropped 25% in 3 months

Is there any recourse to the pension company?

Pensions go up and down all the time.  
There have been some falls in the first part of this year.

What is your risk profile?

How near to retirement are you?

MallyGirl

bazman1955 said:

The value of my personal pension has dropped 25% in 3 months

Is there any recourse to the pension company?

That will be entirely down to the choices of investment you made when you took out the pension. If you chose high risk then this is entirely possible and you would have been warned that ' the value of your investment can go up or down' or some such wording.
A pension is just a wrapper - it does not go up or down, but the investments within it do and you would have chosen them.

gm0

No

Most pension products just provide some fairly cheap admin of a tax wrapper for long term saving using underlying investments.  None of them guarantee the investment performance.  Never have.  Probably never will. Don't charge anything like enough for the product to do something like that.  Even financial advisers charging 0.5%-1% per year of the total on top of the product fees don't guarantee anything about investment performance to their clients

At some point either by default upon joining or a an explicit choice when taking out a pension you chose a fund or a "risk level" i.e. the investments for money to go in.

That fund probably contains a range of things but most commonly equities (company shares) and bonds (government and company loans) from around the world.  A "Cautious" product choice contains more bonds and fewer equities than an "Aggressive" ones with middling ones in between.

For many years now bonds have delivered a trickle of interest coupon but have risen a lot due to a) interest rates falling  b) government interfering with regulation of DB pension scheme liability matching - creating lots of buyers for bonds,
c) governments printing money and fiddling with bond markets for QE. 

Now two of those three have reversed and bonds have fallen back quite sharply.  The more conservative the portfolio i.e. the more bonds it had - the more this has can weigh on short term performance.

This is not a surprise - this is *normal* behaviour for bonds with rising interest rates.  Equities have been flatter this year with some dips so the start and end dates of the 3 month reporting snapshot may show a peak to a trough and be more or less realistic over a full year.

The *long* term performance between starting saving and retirement is what matters.  30 years not 3 months. 

Swings of 40 - 60 % along the way would not be impossible and have happened repeatedly.  Even more if you have "Aggressive" choices.  I got a statement along the way showing a 50% drop.  It's not fun is it.

Don't panic. 

Understand the risk level you chose. What it means.  What you hold.
What that would probably mean in long term returns over decades to the pension later.   Be comfortable with that long term choice that it suits you.

JohnWinder

Can anyone give me a rough idea of a plausible pension investment that would have fallen 25% in the last 3 months?

biscan25

JohnWinder said:

Can anyone give me a rough idea of a plausible pension investment that would have fallen 25% in the last 3 months?

I can't think of any mainstream investment. Perhaps an emerging markets fund extremely overweight in Russia.
Some strategic bond funds would've likely performed terribly, more a 15% drop tops than 25% though

dunstonh

Is there any recourse to the pension company?

Why do you think the pension company is responsible for your losses?

Most people are down around 10% in that period.   With you being down 25% then that seems high.    Gilts and fixed interest securities are one of the main reasons people are down around 10%.   

To be down 25% would suggest you are heavy in tech stocks or eastern European/Russian stocks.

You haven't mentioned anything about your investments. So, it is difficult to say until you do.
So, what are you invested in?
Who picked those investments?

penners324

I was down 10% about 4 months ago, currently about 1% down compared to October 2021.

That's in a high risk fund with PensionBee....

Thrugelmir

bazman1955 said:

The value of my personal pension has dropped 25% in 3 months

One post and gone ? 

Troytempest

It was only today at 10.08. Some people do have other things to do in life rather than sit on here all day......