Every fund on PensionInsights carries one of five labels. LOW, MEDIUM, HIGH, EXTREME, or UNRATED.
People read them as grades. They are not grades.
What the tier is
A tier comes from one measurement: how much a fund has actually moved over the past year, counting its unit value together with the distributions it paid.
Realized volatility, entirely backward looking. It describes what already happened.
It is not a forecast, and it is not a verdict on whether a fund is any good.
Why HIGH is not an insult
A long horizon equity fund is supposed to move. If it did not move, it would not be doing its job.
A HIGH tier on that fund is not a warning that something has gone wrong. It is a number telling you the size of the ride.
The useful question is never “is this tier good”. It is “is this tier what I expected from this fund”. A bond fund reading HIGH is interesting. An equity fund reading HIGH is an ordinary Tuesday.
Where a tier stops being useful
A tier compresses a year of movement into one word, and compression loses things. It cannot tell you why a fund moved, whether that was one bad month or twelve unremarkable ones, or what the fund holds.
That is why the volatility percentage sits next to the tier everywhere on the site, and why the fund’s history is one click away. The label is an entry point, not a conclusion.
Tiers are decided by thresholds. Where those thresholds sit, and how the measurement is built, we keep to ourselves. That part is what makes it worth building.
We publish the measurement. What to do with it is your decision, and your licensed adviser’s.