The brilliant Katie Martin ends her opinion piece questioning why the markets are having a good time when they shouldn’t be.

This is uncomfortable for those still wedded to quaint notions like corporate strategy and government debt sustainability, but you fight the crisis-battling prowess of the Fed and the US government at your peril. It seems that this year, few intend to bother trying.

We will no doubt continue saving for retirement into funds that get exposure to the melt-up that’s going on now and (as down follows up) we will get exposure to the melt-down.  But according to Katie, it won’t be quite now..

The muck is still sliding off Teflon-coated markets, pessimists appear to be giving up the fight and the melt-up is very much in play.

I spent much of the weekend at war with myself as I have a reasonable amount in DC pensions and ISAs and I want to exchange this money for an income that provides me with a degree of certainty. I could of course abandon the equity markets and buy an annuity but I want an income that goes up with inflation and when you look at the inflation linked annuity rates, you wonder whether the long term direction of equities isn’t a little higher than what can be guaranteed me from bonds (and the prudence of insurers – especially for their shareholders).

I want to be able to read about the markets at times like this and know that I can stay in equities and other growth areas of the market and have my pension paid through melt-ups and melt-downs. That is what I expect from a pension.

But for now, the cries of dismay we had last April are history. Unless that is for the people who cashed out last April.

Casting an eye across the outlooks from all the major investment banks and big asset managers, it is close to impossible to find a naysayer. US policy on trade and interference in central banking remains a clear and present danger to every portfolio, but the astonishing market resilience of 2025 makes it very difficult to justify whining from the sidelines.

The dark days of April, when US President Donald Trump’s whackadoodle global trade policy sent markets careering lower, are an increasingly distant memory.

“In April, if you had told people we would be at all-time highs and looking at economic growth of 2.4 per cent . . . and that we would be moving down the scale on trade tensions, people would tell you that’s the best-case scenario,”

said Alexandra Wilson-Elizondo, global co-head of multi-asset solutions at Goldman Sachs Asset Management in New York.

I would be surprised if there wasn’t another April 2025 in 2026 and in truth I cannot see a solution coming from my pension providers (Nest and L&G) to protect my “pot” even though I will reach my normal retirement age (65) on my bigger pot in November. What if I took my pot in November 2026, would L&G offer me certainty?

The answer is of course that that’s my choice and I, like millions of savers have to set our sights on another 30 years (my estimate of my longevity) on our view of what will happen to our pot.

And yet, here we are, living in the best of all possible worlds, with stellar corporate earnings having done all the heavy lifting on asset prices in the US, the world’s dominant financial market. Big investors readily confess to being stunned. This sits very awkwardly alongside a widespread suspicion that stocks, especially tech stocks, are in a bubble and that the US economy is showing some hairline cracks.

There is no serious discussion of investments going on between trustees and savers. This is the basis of my quarrel with L&G who have been boasting about the care they are showing savers with “member forums”.  When I started in this business in the early 1980s, the view was that profits from the markets would be smoothed out and paid out to savers as a pension “with profits”. There was a sharing of the good times and protection against the bad times. Now that has gone, you now give all the profit to the insurer (annuity) or take all the risks yourself (drawdown).

One thing we now is that we can’t predict when the markets will go up and when go down even if we are the best and JP Morgan’s Karen Ward is pretty good. Here she is talking to Katie Martin

The strong performance of markets in 2025 has produced “bafflement”, said Ward. “How is it that we’ve had tariffs and geopolitics are bleak and the French government has failed twice and markets are at record highs? That’s the question we’re asked all the time.”

No one is certain and Katie Martin reckons that this means we complacently take whatever is thrown us. But we have a financial services industry that should be protecting people so that they get security in later days.  Katie Martin points out what we actually get.

Fundamentals be damned. In the age of easy-peasy index-tracking passive investment and reliable knee-jerk financial support to any shock, it is very much starting to feel like the only way is up. Markets track the volume of money pouring in to them, not just the nitty gritty of the assets underneath, which means negative shocks have to be truly enormous to knock them off course.

I guess one answer to the question “where do we stand on market melt-up” is to keep paying the premiums.  But I’d like to have a better answer from those who run my pensions, I would like some certainty that when the inevitable “melt down” does arrive, I have someone holding a safety blanket.