Innovation may have become a dirty word as a result of the financial crisis, but good salesmen are not paid to be kept down. Armed with the latest “next big thing”, absolute-return fixed-income strategies, they may find they are pushing against open doors.

Absolute-return fixed-income funds have been on the horizon for a few years. Investment consultants such as Mercer say they have been researching them for the past three or four years and institutional investors in the Netherlands, Spain and Italy began investing in them two years ago. This month the strategy hit the big time in the UK, when the £8bn (€8.9bn) Strathclyde Pension fund announced it had awarded a total of £600m to Pimco and Threadneedle to invest in bonds on an absolute-return basis.