Thank you for the question. I'll give some comments, and I think Mr. Cass may want to as well.
We believe that our mandate is very clear. We need to maximize returns for our pensioners and contributors while also not taking undue risks. When we look at maximizing returns without undue risk of loss, we believe that it is prudent to gradually increase our risk up towards the 85% equity equivalent risk, and we're doing so over an extended period of time. We're doing that over three years.
One of the reasons why we took that decision recently was that since active management—we made that decision back in 2006—we've had quite a successful run despite extraordinary volatility in markets over that period of time and despite weathering the global financial crisis. We've had returns over that period of 7.3% and we substantially outperformed what would have been the passive alternative that we measure ourselves against, what we call the reference portfolio. We've created over $17.1 billion of additional value.
When we look at that, we are fairly confident in our ability to manage our active strategies and confident that they are creating value. So we see an opportunity to take a little more risk given the very long-term nature of our outlook. We think that is prudent within the context of the structure of the fund.