Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Peru's pension funds return on investment

Let's see how the 4.5m or so Peruvians who contribute to private pension funds (known as "AFP") have been getting on.


This chart shows the YoY investment return since January 2005. We see the strong returns into 2008 and then the big fat defaltionary drop. Since then the rebound. It is of course important to know at what point on the cycle an individual pension holder joined the bandwagon as about a million people have been added to the list since 2005, but someone who added $1000 on January 1st 2005 would have seen a pre-commish profit of 74.4% in the entire period, which isn't bad going at all. But as the commish charged by the funds is around 3.5% per annum, it also means the managers have become very big, very fat and very rich. Hey, nobody said capitalism was fair, did they?