Targeting larger employers, the Standard Life DC Master Trust has more than £500m in assets, serving more than 100,000 members across just 22 employers.
The default is well diversified across a number of different asset classes, and has a low equity exposure of 48 per cent in the growth phase, falling to 24 per cent five years before state pension age. It carries by far the lowest level of risk of any of the defaults supplying us with both risk and return data, and has, not surprisingly in the rising markets of recent years, lagged all its peers save for Now: Pensions in terms of returns. Given the short period for which data has been gathered, Standard would be justified in arguing their performance ranking would have been very different had markets been less benign.
