The Big C is in the news again http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8246829.stm with the news that depression affects survival rates and one doesn’t have to guess which way. What else did they expect? If you visit someone say in a nursing home or hospital i.e. showing that you care about them, is this going to harm their health or make them feel better? The effect of this was shown a few years ago visiting one of my relatives in a nursing home. Walking in the through the lounge where the TV was on and several inmates stuck in their wheelchairs, some of their faces would light up as you walked in only to drop again as you carried on to spend a little time with your relative.

Friday at the RAF Club with BRX Bond Street and resident jeweller Lewis of www.joseph-sterling.com informs us he is doing the New York marathon again with his nominated charity being  http://www.meirpanimuk.org/about which looks after Holocaust survivors in Israel. In the saddest case of YCMIU, these only get a pension in Israel if they arrived from Germany or UK. Got to Israel from the Ukraine for example, sorry no pension. If you would like to support him, go to http://www.justgiving.com/lewismalka/ Have previously mentioned that in my glorious school holidays in Germany, my German grandparents had noticeably better pensions than their English counterparts, making you wonder even in my pre-teen years, Who won the War? And just to cap this story, this means that Holocaust survivors best pensions are in Germany.

Still on the subject of pensions, a new word for my next Scrabble game perhaps is senescence mentioned by Royal London pensions guru Steve Bee, who you can follow on Twitter http://twitter.com/PensionsGuru

“We all seem to think that modern humans live a lot longer than people used to, but that is not really the case. Mortality improvements from the medical and social advances of the last few hundred years have not really extended our natural lifespan by more than two or three years, but have allowed more people to achieve it. A word was made up to explain this – ‘senescence’. It was defined as ‘the lifespan that can be achieved under optimal conditions’. An 1841 actuarial table showed UK senescent deaths at around 40% of total deaths. So four in ten people dying in 1841 had made it to their seventies. By 1962, UK senescent deaths were recorded at around 75% of total deaths, another massive improvement. And things go on. We will now see further advances in medicine and social policy that may push the percentage of senescent deaths ever higher and at the same time increase the peak age we can expect to reach as well. The society we live in will itself age further as a result.”

Colleague points out that previous good news http://www.georgeemsden.co.uk/2009/09/afghanistan-bananastand/ regarding Friends Provident withdrawal of MVR penalties is a lot more complicated than at first appears, only serving to make me avoid this minefield of investment history.

Haven’t counted shopping days to Christmas yet but one Christmas present for yours truly will be:  300 Beers to Try before you Die by Roger Protz http://beer-pages.com/stories/300-beers.htm and if you really want to know how many days are left, here is a shopping day counter:  http://www.allcapecod.com/shoptillchristmas.cfm Thank heaven for the internet, where you can do your shopping on-line, including gift-wrapping and delivery.

Talking of prizes and presents, the Premium Bond notional interest rate increases to 1.5% from 1st October 2009. Have always mentioned them to clients as they can leaven the rather heavy subject of financial planning, but at that rate not much fun even though the winnings are tax-free.

Living many years in north London and passing what used to be The Settle Inn near Archway, curiosity gets the better of me as Charlotte Despard http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Wdespard.htm now has a pub as well as a road named after her, and was quite a feisty lady it seems.

End of week is at the Berkeley Square offices of Frontier Capital Management whose evidence-based investing approach makes a lot of sense. Reiterating that you can’t beat the market in the long run like previous blog http://www.georgeemsden.co.uk/2009/07/how-long-is-a-piece-of-string/ and pointing out that different asset classes have different embedded rates of return, leads to the sobering thought, Do you really need an investment manager? (See heading) And with 40 per cent of global money invested in Index-tracking funds/products, a lot of other people think so too. A word of warning here, no one approach is head of the pack all the time. Investing has its fashions and if your logical, well-researched approach isn’t flavour of the month, there are going to be times when other people’s approaches appear to defy gravity and streak ahead of you.

Putting it another way, let’s divide investment fund performance into four quartiles. The average is obviously the top of the third quartile or if you prefer, bottom of the second quartile. BUT all funds have costs, and take these off the fund values and the long-term average will be near the top of the third quartile i.e. just below the median/average. Not the sort of thing that would win an Olympic medal, but practically impossible to escape and no reason to stop investing.

But let me finish with some amusement. Keith Floyd’s obituary http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/celebrity-obituaries/6192702/Keith-Floyd.html unsurprisingly reveals a wicked sense of humour where he once fried a breaded beermat for an ungrateful customer who ate it, but complained about something else!