Company's pension fund performance

I am currently reviewing our Company's pension fund (ie Eagle Star) performance with the performance achieved by its competitors over the last 5 years. To help me do this I printed off a report entitled "Global Equity Performance as at 30th September 2004" from www.finfacts.ie, an excellent website on all matters financial.

The problem I have is that the 9 months to September 2004 result for Eagle Star is a miserable 1.7% (23rd out of 25) whereas the result per the Eagle Star website for a balance fund for the same period is a whopping 6.06% for the same period. I am assuming that the Global sector report relates to balanced funds also as its results for 3 years and 5 years actually tie in to Eagle Stars results for the balance fund.

Can anyone explain to me why there is such a difference ?????

I think that the global equity performance relates to equity only funds and not to balanced funds.

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It's not stated on www.finfacts.ie but from it's title I presume the survey of Global Equity funds here refers to equity funds only. This would include the Eagle Star International Dynamic Fund, I'd imagine, not their Balanced Fund. (The International Dynamic Fund is 100% equities, the Balanced Fund is equities, gilts and cash.)

As an aside, given the long-term nature of pension fund investing, looking at performance over a period of <12 months is arguably irrelevant.

The Eagle Star balance fund is 74% equities, 15% bonds and 11% cash. I don't think that the 26% bonds and cash accounts for the huge difference in returns per Eagle Stars own website and the Global Equity fund survey - it just doen't make sense!

First things first - you need to get accurate independently verified data for the fund(s) in question and only then compare them to the Eagle Star published results for the relevant period(s). FinFacts is a good site all right but I have often found it to be out of date or inaccurate with financial data so I personally would not depend on it. Isn't there some other independent source (not necessarily free!) for this information (e.g. MoneyMate or one of the pension tracking tools/services that pension intermediaries use - can't remember the name(s) though)?

or one of the pension tracking tools/services that pension intermediaries

Click to expand...

Like the Irish Independent & Irish Times on a Thur/Fri respectively

Yes - but if you need to gauge performance from a specific date (e.g. the "9 months to September 2004" mentioned in the original query) and not just year to date or over the past 1/3/5/10 years then you'll presumably need more detailed data?