More than one million investors intend to stop investing in with-profits policies because they are unhappy with their performance, finds Managing Partners Limited (MPL).

Research reveals that seven out of 10 holders of with-profits policies are unhappy with their performance, including 32 per cent who are very unhappy, and as a result 1.33 million people intend to stop investing in them.
 
The proportion of investors who are ‘fairly’ happy with their policies has fallen to 2.3 million from 2.91 million when the same research was carried last year and 3.60 million in 2007, while those who are ‘not very happy’ has risen to 3.36 million from 3.49 million a year ago.

Jeremy Leach, managing director of MPL, says, ‘For the last three years we have charted the relentless decline of with-profits in the UK. With-profits’ failure to deliver on promises of steady returns has been exposed in the wake of the terrible market returns seen in recent years. But many people still invest in this outdated form of investment, which reveals they are at a loss to know where else to go.
 
‘What many of them perhaps do not realise is that there is an alternative in traded life policy funds, which offer the steady, predictable returns that with profits once delivered. Investors and their advisers need to find alternatives to with-profits, and from our experience the message is getting through given the increasing interest we are seeing.’
 
Traded life policies (TLPs) are US-issued whole of life policies sold before their maturity date to allow the original owners to enjoy some of the benefits during their own lifetimes.

By building diversified portfolios of these policies and carrying out the right actuarial analysis, fund managers can use them to deliver steady, incremental returns that are uncorrelated to other financial asset classes.
 
For example, the sterling denominated growth share class in MPL’s Traded Policies Fund returned 10.47 per cent net of all charges in the 12 months to 1 January 2009 and 9.78 per cent over the year to 1 June 2009.