For Professional Clients only .

When we ’ re saving for retirement , it ’ s very common for us to aim to maximise investment returns . This is usually done with some constraint on the level of risk determined either by ourselves , or in the case of Defined Contribution ( DC ) default options , by those who govern the scheme . This is entirely consistent with the aim of trying to maximise our retirement wealth so that we may retire when we hope , or preferably sooner , with a standard of living somewhere close to that to which we will have become accustomed .

But as we start thinking more carefully about when we want to retire and how much income we might need , we may start to think differently about what we need from our investments . We can move away from thinking about what we might be able to achieve to what we actually need to meet our

goals . We can think about risk not in abstract terms of what level of volatility we ’ re comfortable with but how willing and able we are to accept a worse outcome than we are aiming for .

Investing always involves a trade off between risk and reward but the focus in retirement is very

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