SAVERS who want to take advantage of capital guarantees that have been such an attractive feature of tracker bonds and who also want to tap into the current growth being experienced by the stock markets, are being offered an investment product from the EBS Building Society that will attempt to meet such an expectation.

Called the 50/50 Investment Plan, it invests half of total capital (minimum £5,000) for the five year and nine month duration of the contract in the EBS Tracker account, which is based on the Japanese Nikkei index. A minimum return of 25 per cent is guaranteed, and an 85 per cent return is possible.

The remainder of the capital is put into the EBS Growth Fund, which has been one of the most successful investment funds over the past five years with gross compound annual returns of 12.4 per cent. Income or withdrawals are available from the Growth Fund part of the investment and tax on the tracker is at standard DIRT rates while standard rate tax will be deducted at source for any gains made by the Growth Fund element.

Meanwhile, after last week's article about investing in stock market index tracker funds, Irish Life has written to say that it has a number of tracker index funds for pension investors. The stock markets that are tracked are the ISEQ (excluding Elan plc), FTA UK, a UK Equity index, the FTA Europe, the US Standard and Poors 500, the FTA Pacific (excluding Japan), the FTA Japan and a fixed interest fund known as the Riada over 5 Index. There is also a Market Performance Fund which spreads your money across all these indices together with a small amount of property and cash.

Irish Life pension index funds include the full capital growth and payment of dividends from the representative stocks. Interested investors should inquire about the charging structure.