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her into the currencies of countries she would never dream of visiting (think Turkish lira, where interest rates were 17 per cent or so in the mid2000s), as well as highyielding foreign equity funds and a variety of complicated derivatives. Middle Japan became a market mover. Now think of millions of US and UK retirees doing the same scouring the globe not for capital gains
editor-in-chief of Money Week and previously worked as a stockbroker. The views expressed in her column are personal. merryn@ft.com
These days, if you want to get a reasonable return on your money you have to take risks
but for the income they need to maintain their living standards, without eating too much of their capital. They too could easily be market movers. My point is that, while many of the products that produce income look expensive today, in the context of many millions of oldies stampeding into them over the next decade, they might not be. It is irritating to pay more than net asset value for an investment trust and today you might wonder if 7.5 per cent is enough to compensate you for the risk of handing cash to a company in the tough business of currency conversion. But it might be that, five years out, it will be hard to regret choosing to chase income, simply because everyone else will be doing exactly the same thing. Merryn Somerset Webb is
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web. FT and 'Financial Times' are trademarks of The Financial Times Ltd.