When it comes to creating visualizations on the web D3 is often your first port of call. Whether by putting together a custom creation from scratch, or making use of one of the many charting libraries and examples available.

The former, creating visualizations myself using the low-level functionality provided by D3, is my area of interest. In particular I'm interested in doing this over-and-over again. As with any other type of software development I'm involved with, I'm looking to make a trade-off between creating abstractions and designing for reuse on one-hand, and KISS and YAGNI on the other-hand.

I read Nikesh Patel’s engaging article Superflat with interest. Nikesh laments the focus on gilt yields and argues instead for a ‘time consistent flat discount rate’ to value pension schemes. It is always welcome to see discussion on alternatives to the current valuation methodology – marking £tr’s of pension liabilities to a tiny (by comparison) index linked gilt market has unintended consequences which Nikesh articulates well.

To my mind asset prices remain the right place to start. We need to be smarter though about how we choose them and have been working with pension schemes and insurers to design portfolios that deliver matching income with a higher yielding asset universe. See Solving The Pension Conundrum.

Many thanks to Bloomberg Intelligence for hosting their conference ‘Solving the Corporate Pension Conundrum’ yesterday. We met a few new faces amongst some old friends and the talks and conversations were thought provoking.

It is becoming increasing evident that marking-to-the-gilt-market is all very well as a point of reference but must be viewed in the broader market context. One slide from the engaging Jon Hatchett showed the relative decline since QE in gilt yields (staggering) and other credit markets (broadly flat) and shouts at alternatives to deflate the pensions deficit balloon.