AkademikerPension chief investment officer (CIO), Anders Schelde, has admitted that the pension fund’s 2025 investment return was around 3 percentage points below its industry peers.

In 2025, AkademikerPension’s most common risk profile, a medium-risk pension plan with 15 years to retirement, recorded a return of 5.7 per cent.

Schelde explained that this return was “by no means bad” but said the fund “must also admit that it is weaker than our industry colleagues, who on average seem to land a good three percentage points higher than this”.

In particular, he highlighted three main reasons for this weaker return, including Novo Nordisk's share price decline, the decline of the US dollar and the restructuring of the fund’s equity strategy.

He explained that for years, the pension fund has been more exposed to Novo Nordisk's share price than others in the industry, which has previously served it well, but this year it did not.

Furthermore, the pension fund is not insured against exchange rate falls in the same way as several others in the industry are, which also resulted in returns being affected.

Additionally, 2025 saw the AkademikerPension conduct a major restructuring of its equity strategy, which involved hiring a new equity team and a shift in portfolio management, as a large part of the portfolio's management was moved in-house after being managed externally.

However, during the restructuring, there were increases in the stock market, which affected returns.

Despite this, the fund emphasised that its long-term returns are “still quite robust” and it is ranked third among the top 10 pension products that have existed for 10 years or more.

AkademikerPension also explained that it uses the smoothing mechanism, which means that a member's pension payment is calculated as an average of the returns over the past 10 years.

As a result, there are very small fluctuations in the payments over time, meaning members can rely on what they get paid to a much greater extent than with other pension companies, even though the return may fluctuate from year to year.

“So, all in all, we are very confident that we are in a good place with our investment strategy, and I am pleased to note that in the second half of the year we already had a much better return development with a position in the better half of the pension market, but unfortunately it was not enough to close the gap from the first half of the year,”  Schelde said.

Looking ahead, the pension fund said that 2026 does not look like it will differ much from last year’s turmoil, in terms of exchange rate fluctuations, tariff wars, war and geopolitical tensions.

Schelde suggested that this makes it “virtually impossible” to predict anything about how the investment markets will end.

But he said, overall, AkademikerPension is “relatively positive” about 2026, both in terms of its investment strategy and market development. 

“However, that does not mean that everything is fine, because the market does not always rise for the right reasons; for example, it could be a bubble that is being inflated. At the same time, there are many uncertainties, not least on the geopolitical scene,” Schelde said.

"So, we are also looking into a year where the range of outcomes is larger than usual, and we believe that a strategy with high-risk diversification like ours is the right one."

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