Robert Sutherland Smith is again proving that he is still alive with another guest post. Robert started his City career the year before I was born and is, I think, 157 years old. Fear not. He is very much alive and kicking. He and I have worked together for almost eight years at t1ps.com . He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at TradingResearchPoint on FTSE 350 Income stocks. Robert is a speaker at the UKInvestor Show on April 13th. He is a great one for focussing on yield. RSS today looks at Standard Life.
I willingly confess that I have generally found little difficulty in resisting past temptations to take a keen interest in Standard Life (SL.). Life assurance and annuities, the traditional focus of this two hundred year old company, are not the most exciting or fastest moving business activity in the world. That fact combined with the dry as dust name ‘Standard Life’ has invariably – by which I mean without variation – presented a cocktail of too dull a prospect to greet with of warm enthusiasm.
What life has ever been standard and who would wish it so? A name that is a negation of language and the constipation of linguistic imagination. But one which – putting the other case – fully conveys the attributes essential in a business concerned with the scientific measurement of and accounting for group human mortality in relation to the calculation of premiums and benefits for life assurance and pension annuities. Surely, was there not somebody on the occasion of its christening in some boardroom long ago, who felt an instinctive urge to giggle nervously and ask, “surely, we are not calling it Standard Life, are we? “
on TradingResearchPoint | Comments