This fund aims to offer ‘inflation optionality’. Will it work?

When Friedrich Nietzsche observed that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, he probably didn’t have sustained inflation in mind. If fast-rising prices weren’t tricky enough for governments, consumers, companies and investors to handle, then the medicine – in the shape of higher interest rates – does not, on recent evidence, offer much hope of a return to strength.

Is this hyperbole? This week showed UK consumer price inflation came in at 10.4 per cent in February, more than five times both the average between 2000 and 2021 and the Bank of England’s 2 per cent target. Rewind the tape to 1962, however, and the longer-term average clocks in at 5 per cent.