cash might often be overlooked, but it's an essential part of your investment toolkit. In this video, we'll explore cash and cash-like investments, reasons to hold them, and the factors that influence short-term interest rates. We'll also discuss the current interest rate landscape, the guarantees associated with cash investments, and conclude with the best places to hold cash today, in my opinion. Remember, if you do enjoy our videos, please do subscribe to the channel and like this video. Now, there are lots of investments which are cash-like as well as cash itself. So, what would we look like for something which is cash-like? I think the first point is something which is liquid. In other words, you can quickly sell it and generate funds which you can then spend directly, and that process should be very cheap, very easy, and very fast. Secondly, cash is low risk. We wouldn't expect its buying power to suddenly crash overnight. Inflation eats away at the buying power of our money, our cash, but it happens over fairly long time scales, so cash isn't crashy, in other words, and then

Finally, if we're thinking about it as a fixed income investment, then we describe it as zero duration. That means that if interest rates increase or decrease, it doesn't affect the buying power of our money. Whereas if you have a bond, for example, and interest rates increase, the price of that bond will fall. So, interest rate insensitivity is also an important attribute. So, what kind of investments have these cash-like attributes? Well, the first one I'd say would be a fixed term deposit at a bank. Now, these are fixed rate, fixed term deposits at banks where you get some kind of penalty if you withdraw your cash too soon. Now, these don't satisfy the liquidity constraint for cash, but they are very safe, and of course, they are not affected by interest rates. A second investment which is very cash-like is a cash ISA. Here, you can store money in a tax wrapper where you don't have to pay any capital gains or income tax on it, and this forms part of your 20K ISA allowance as of this tax year. Now, these are liquid, they're often

flexible, so you can take money out and put it back in during the course of the year without losing that year's user allowance, and they also come with a guarantee, which we'll discuss at the end of the video. Then we've got money market funds. Now, these are investments inside a fund, which are very safe, very short-term, very short duration, so they tend to be very cash-like in terms of having very little crash risk, but also generating usually quite small returns like cash. However, they are very liquid. If you need the money, you can sell the fund sometimes in the space of a few days, sometimes even sooner if it's an ETF, for example. And then finally, if you buy UK guilts, these UK government bonds, and these are short-term UK guilts which you hold to maturity, these would also, I'd say, be very cash-like. Their duration isn't exactly zero like it is for cash; it depends on the maturity of the bond. But if you've got a one-year guilt or a six-month guilt, it'll give

returns which are very similar to cash and have very little volatility. So, why would you ever own cash-like investments or hold cash itself? I think there are three reasons why people do this, and three justifiable reasons, I should say. The first one is to diversify your equity holdings. Equity is a fickle friend; it often crashes, it can be a real roller coaster owning it. But if you do hold a safe investment alongside it, that dampens the volatility and gives you less sleepless nights. It also usually reduces your return because the price of safety is less return long-term. To illustrate that, I've got an example here, which is a Life Strategy 60 fund from Vanguard. Now, that holds a combination of global equity funds along with global bond funds, and the duration of those is around 7 to 10 years, so it's kind of intermediate duration. That means if interest rates increase, the price of the bonds in the portfolio can fall. Alongside that, what I've done is I've plotted the return you'd have received

with a money market fund 40% of your portfolio and 60% in a global developed Market Equity Fund. Notice how the volatility, the wiggliness of the line, is very similar between those two types of investment. Also, the returns are quite similar over this 13-year period. So, just like bonds, cash-like Investments can substitute for Bonds in your portfolio in order to reduce risk and diversify your Equity. Another reason to hold cash-like Investments is as dry powder. Equity gives you good long-term returns, but it is a roller coaster, and when it crashes, you can use that opportunity to buy stocks at a depressed price. But in order to do that, you have to have some dry powder, some uncached investment in order to buy the equity. You can use bonds for that, but sometimes they crash too. So, for example, here I've compared three things. In the top panel, you can see the drawdown from the previous all-time high for an Equity Fund. Yes, it's very crashy; sometimes those crashes can be quite extended. In the middle

panel. You can see the same plot for a money market fund and in the bottom panel for a global bond fund, which is Sterling hedged. Now, sometimes bonds are a very good hedge for equity, usually when inflation isn't too high. But if we look at 2022, when inflation was high, you can see that bonds crashed at the same time as equity, and that meant there were a very poor choice as dry powder. Whereas if we look at cash-like investments like a money market fund, you can see that that didn't crash at any point really. So, as a dry powder investment, cash is great because cash doesn't crash. And then finally, one very good reason to invest in cash-like investments is if you need the money over a short period of time. Let's say you're looking for a house, you need a deposit, or perhaps there's some other unexpected expense that might crop up at any point in time. Now, what you don't want is for the investment to have crashed just when you need the money. So, I often use this diagram to show people

roughly how to think about investment and really risk over different investment periods. For a period below about 5 years, I'd say a lot of the money should be invested in something which is not crashy, and that would ideally be something which is cash-like. You may also want to have cash-like investments for the 5 to 10-year period, but then if we're looking at 10 years or beyond, I think having cash in your portfolio would probably be a mistake because it returns usually much less than equity. Now, you often see comparisons of interest rates where they show you this is the return you'll get on a fixed-term deposit, this is what you'll get with a cash ISA. But what I'm going to try and do now is explain to you how those rates come about, but also the source of those rates. Because if you have some kind of insight into how these short-term rates are driven, then you'll be able to predict yourself how they're likely to change in the future. It's not just about rates today, it's about where rates are.

headed, and that way hopefully you'll be able to make a better decision about where to park your money. So, what is it that actually drives short-term rates? Well, short-term interest rates are driven primarily by the central bank's monetary policy, and in the UK, the monetary policy rate is called the bank rate. You can find that on the Bank of England's website. Currently, it's 5%. But what I've also done here is I've plotted alongside the bank rate two other rates which you might not be as familiar with. One of them is the yield on one-year government bonds or guilts, as they're called in the UK, and the other one is Sonia, the Sterling overnight index average rate. Now, that's a kind of cute name for something which is quite technical, but remember that if you invest in a money market fund, they're often benchmarked against Sonia. They generate roughly the Sonia rate, and that's currently a little bit less than the bank rate. It's 4.95%. But what I want you to take home from this graph is how similar those

three rates are bank rate. It really does drive all short-term interest rates. So, if at any point you want to look up what it is you can earn on cash-like investments, look up the Sonia rate because you'll find that at the Bank of England's website, and that tells you what a reasonable rate is at that point in time. Usually, it's a kind of upper limit to what you can earn with cash ises or with deposits. So, if it is bank rate which is driving all the other short-term interest rates, what is it that drives bank rate? Well, the monetary policy committee which sets bank rate is very clear about what its goal is, which is to achieve a 2% rate of inflation and also not tank the economy. So, given that they're trying to steer inflation to this 2% target, if inflation's way above the 2% target, they're going to raise interest rates, and if inflation is way below the 2% target, they'll lower interest rates. They also take other economic factors into

account for example GDP growth. If GDP growth is weak, they'll cut into interest rates. If it looks like the economy is overheating, we haven't had that for some time, but if it was, they'd raise interest rates in order to slow things down and put a break on inflation. And they'll also look at things like employment levels, labor market conditions, consumer spending, business investment, and also global economic developments, which indirectly affect the UK. So, if you do want to have some kind of insight into where interest rates are headed at the short end of the curve, then watch inflation because that'll give you a steer as to what the Bank of England is going to do in future. And just to show you that money market funds do in fact track Sonia fairly closely, what I've got here is six UK money market funds and the cumulative return on those six money market funds, which is shown in blue, alongside what you would have earned if you'd have cumulatively earned Sonia. So, how closely are these money market funds

tracking Sonia in other words, and the answer is pretty closely. There isn't a lot to choose between them. How can you find one of these money market funds? Well, if you're one of our premium website members, you can learn more about that at pensioncraft.com. Then we have a list of the cheapest funds, including one category for money market funds, and we have lists of cheapest funds like Global Equity Funds, Developed Market Equity Funds, and so on. But the point I'm trying to make here is that money market funds or cash-like investments all tend to follow the same rate, which is set by the Bank of England. So, let's look at the rate landscape right now, and let's start with government debt. Now, there aren't that many government bonds issued by the UK government. This is how they borrow. There are about 60 bonds that they've issued which are outstanding at the moment, and you can see them all as these little squares on this graph. The x-axis tells you the term of the borrowing from 0 years.

up to 50 years, and the y-axis tells you the yield you'd get if you bought the bond today and waited until maturity. I've also shown Sonia on that graph, and currently, it is 4.95%. Notice how the Sonia rate, which is what you done with a money market fund, is above all of those guilts. So, that immediately tells you that the rate right now is not particularly attractive on most guilts. However, with a guilt, you'd lock in the rate for the lifetime of the bond. So, if you think that Sonia is about to tank because the Bank of England's going to cut rates, then it might be worthwhile locking in a rate for a fairly short period of time, maybe a year, 2 years, or even longer. If you think rates are about to tank, what would drive that cut in the Sonia rate? Well, remember that's inflation. Another consideration here with guilts is that you don't pay capital gains tax on guilts. So, if you hold them outside an ISA or a SIP, then they may still be

interesting, even though their absolute yield is lower than that of, say, a money market fund or a cash deposit. So, once you consider that tax break, no capital gains tax, they often become much more competitive. But certainly, if you've got an Isa or a sip, and you're considering whether to invest in a money market fund or a guilt at the moment, I still think it's the case that you probably wouldn't go for the guilt. If it's money parked outside an ISO or a sip, maybe you received an inheritance, maybe you sold a business. Well, there I think guilts are much more worthy of consideration if you take tax into account. Now, if you are one of our premium website members, you get access to the latest guilt yields, which will be updated daily. We just go down to the macroeconomic tracker, as they're called, and we choose UK yield curve. So, here you can see all of those guilts, and if you hover over one, it'll show you how much yield you'll get with that guilt. We've also got a guilt table, and here

you can filter by the size of the coupon, so if we set that to 05% maximum, you can see all of the low coupon guilts in the UK right now. And you can also get more information about each of them. So if you do want to learn more about our membership, just go to our website pensioncraft tocom slmh. And by the way, you get lots of other goodies like members-only videos as well as a chat application, so you can ask questions whenever you like. How about other cash-like investments right now? Are they comparable to Sonia 2? Well, the answer is yes. Usually, they're a little bit less than Sonia. If they are more than Sonia, then it's because of some constraints that they impose on you. For example, they might force you to save regularly or lock in the money for some period of time, reducing the liquidity of your investment, in other words. And if we look at Cash ISAs again, notice how the returns on those are quite similar to those money market fund rates or Sonia.

because remember the way that these institutions generate their returns is probably by investing in money market funds or other similar types of instruments. Now let's consider guarantees that come with different types of cash-like investments. Now when I speak to people about cash investments, they always say, Does it come with the FSCS guarantee? This is the Financial Services Compensation Scheme, and if you're not familiar with that, the way it works is that you get protection for a deposit at a bank, building society, or credit union up to £85,000 per person per authorized institution. So that means if you have a joint account, you get a total of £170,000 protection if you're in a couple, and it's not a joint account, then you still get the £85k limit per person. Now be careful with the word institution there because sometimes you have multiple brands under the same authorized institution. So you can check that on the FCA's website. So for example, Lloyd's Banking Group is huge, and it has multiple brands like Halifax Bank of

Scotland Lloyd Bank PLC, Lloyd's Bank private banking, MBNA, and Scottish widows Bank, all of those would fall under the same institutional umbrella, which is Lloyd's banking group. So, if you want to split your deposits to get 85k protection for each one, you couldn't do it within that brand family. So, if you have a cash is up or you have a bank fixed term deposit, both of those come with an FSCS guarantee. Just be careful with the institutions. A money market fund won't have that guarantee, but I'd argue it's still very, very safe, and that's because of the things which it buys, usually government bonds which have a very short times of maturity, certificates of deposit that would be deposits with banks, or alternatively short-term IUS issued by companies. That's called commercial paper, but we have done a whole video on the safety of money market funds, and there'll be a link to that in the description of this video, also at the end of the video. And then finally, if you buy UK government

bonds or guilts. They are guaranteed by the government. Now, the UK government hasn't defaulted for centuries, so it is very, very safe. So, no FSCS guarantee, but hey, the government can print more money if it needs to service its debt. So, in conclusion, where do I think it's best to hold your cash right now? I think at the moment, if it's inside an ISA or a SIP, I'd still go for a money market fund. I wouldn't bother with a cash ISA. I'd probably just buy a money market fund in my stocks and shares ISA because I use it as a form of dry powder. If equity markets do tank, I can then buy it directly within the same account, and that's within an ISA or a SIP. Either of those can be used to hold a money market fund. Once interest rates start to fall a bit more, then I'll start to think about buying guilts and using those as a substitute for my money market fund. Outside an ISA or a SIP, I think guilts.

might be something to consider, and that's because of the tax break. If you buy low coupon guilts, you don't pay capital gains on them, and of course, they're very safe. If you hold them to maturity, they have duration unlike cash, but if you stick to the short end of the curve, they have very little volatility, and if you hold to maturity, you don't really care about the yield fluctuations anyway. At worst, you're going to get fomo. And then finally, if you're really concerned about guarantees, you're really worried about the institutions failing, well, in that case, a cash Isa might be best currently because you will earn almost this on your rate, if not a little bit more, and it's also very safe and comes with that guarantee. And you can split it across multiple institutions to ensure that everything's covered by the guarantee. Now, don't forget our membership. If you want to join our community, get access to all those great goodies, including our cheapest fund list, but also that guilt tracker so that you

can see those guilt yields updated daily. Then just go to our website pensioncraft.com/membership to learn more, and you'll also find that link in the description below. And as always, thank you for listening.

Where to Park Cash in Today's Market

My name is Ramin Nakisa and I started PensionCraft in 2016 as I felt strongly that I wanted to teach people how to invest well for themselves so they could stop making costly mistakes and losing their money through having to pay unnecessarily high fees.

Before starting PensionCraft, I worked in investment banking as a strategist and I was a frequent contributor on CNBC and Bloomberg TV. I have written two books about finance and investment: one for professional investors and one that explains how to buy and sell volatility using exchange-traded products.

I publish a new video on YouTube every Saturday and you can join me for a live Q&A on the 1st Thursday of every month at 7pm UK time.

If you want to learn how to become a better investor then why not join our friendly membership at pensioncraft.com?
