In the previous century there were only three main financial crises (’29, ’73, ’98). This century has already had four financial crises (’01,’08, ’12, ’20). However, equity markets keep going up and recover well above their historic highs. What has been learnt from more frequent crises of more severe amplitudes? Global quantitative easing efforts have made liquidity and funding available to investors making capital accessible. What has changed is that the cost of capital is getting more and more expensive. This short discussion will look at the cost of investing into equity from the perspective of an insurance company. It will examine how:

• long-only equity delivers great performance but often at a prohibitive capital cost
• protected equity delivers performance over the full cycle across bull and bear markets and can improve efficiency over the full cycle compared to long-only indices
• when adjusted for the cost of capital, protected equity aims to outperform long-only equity indices.