As any investor knows, every crisis presents opportunities. But choosing which opportunity, when, and how, is always tricky. This is the conversation that the managers of liability-driven investment strategies – specialised services that aim to match a pension fund’s assets to its outgoings – are having with their clients right now.

These LDI strategies were introduced around 2004, and there used to be a standard way to set them up. Pension schemes would invest in cash and fixed-income assets expected to pay out exactly in line with the pensions they owe, and would overlay these with interest-rate and inflation swaps.