How it works

Independent, daily monitoring of Canadian pension funds

PensionInsights watches how Canadian pension funds actually behave, day by day, using public fund data. We have no sales pitch and no product to place you in. What you get is a current read on risk.

The industry default

Pension providers typically start with a short questionnaire about your age, income, and years to retirement, then turn those answers into a generic allocation suggestion. It is an assumption built from what you typed, not an analysis of how the underlying funds behave.

What we do

We take the opposite path. There is no questionnaire. We track the funds themselves, using public daily data, historical volatility, risk-tier movements, and stability over time. What comes out is the current picture of each fund, whoever is looking at it.

What you see

Daily risk tiers

Every tracked fund gets a current risk tier, recomputed each day from public data.

Stability rankings

Funds ranked by how steady they've been over time, not just where they sit today.

Change alerts

A note when a fund you're watching moves to a different risk picture.

Provider weather

A calm-to-stormy overview across providers.

The pipeline, at a high level

Collect

Public fund data is gathered every day.

Recompute

Risk and stability metrics are refreshed for every fund.

Compare

Today's numbers are set against each fund's own history.

Publish

The current picture goes live on the site.

How we measure, and what we don't claim

A risk tier, a stability rank, a volatility percentage. Every number on this site is calculated from public fund data, the same way, every day, for every fund. Below is what each one means, how current it is, and what we don't claim to know. We don't publish exactly how the calculation works. Keeping that to ourselves is what makes it worth building.

Coverage

9951 funds tracked across 3 providers today. The risk weather board shows the live count.

Refresh cadence

Every tracked fund is recomputed every business day, using that day's published price alongside the fund's own trading history.

Depth of history

How far back a fund's price history goes varies from fund to fund. A newly added fund has less of it. Each fund's own chart shows how much.

Plain-language definitions

Risk tier: A LOW-to-EXTREME label for how much a fund's value has swung over the past year, distributions included. The label comes from fixed thresholds, the same for every fund.
Stability rank: Compares a fund only against others in its own category, never across categories. It looks at more than how much a fund moved: it also counts how far the fund fell from its high, and how long it stayed below it. Higher means a smoother ride than its category peers.
Volatility (1y): How much a fund's value has moved up and down over the past year, distributions included, as a percentage. Higher means bigger swings.
Allocation band: An estimated stock-vs-bond mix for Balanced funds, grouped into ranges so similar funds are compared together.
UNRATED: A fund we track but do not rate. We have its price history. What we do not have is a measurement we trust for that particular fund, so we publish UNRATED rather than a tier we would not stand behind.

What this is not

We do not forecast where a fund's price is headed next. Nobody can do that reliably, and we won't pretend otherwise. We measure how much a fund has been moving. That is the entire claim. What you do with that measurement, within your plan's rules, is yours to decide.

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