2012 Pension performance

Across December and January i'll do a few annual reviews of my major asset groups, starting with my work pensions.

I currently hold one old (now frozen) and one current (regular monthly contributions) defined contribution pension schemes. The old one is 100% global equities, the current one is around 80% global equities, 20% bonds.

After stripping out both employer & employee contributions in 2012, the combined value of the 2 schemes has increased by around 12.6%, up to the middle of December.  Normally i'd be quite happy with this level of return, but i've had a feeling for some time these schemes have been under-performing the major global indices.

In light of this i thought i'd do a quick spot check of the US, UK, HK & Eurostoxx indices' YTD performance to see how my pensions have performed:

UK  up 6.4%
US  up 12.8%
EUR up 12.8%
HK  up 21%

The results are better than i thought, with my pensions performing broadly in line with the major equities indices.  I do have the ability to vary both the asset allocation, and also to some extent the geographic composition of the schemes, and i plan to critically review and more actively manage these variables in 2013 where i feel changes are appropriate.