Stockspot’s annual Fat Cat Funds report has revealed the best and worst-performing superannuation funds in a volatile financial year.
The best-performing funds were Qantas Super, UniSuper, HESTA, AustralianSuper and IOOF.
Funds which performed poorly were OnePath, Colonial First State, ClearView and AMP and Stockspot said these were familiar names from previous years. OnePath had since been sold to Insignia so the report was optimistic this could change its fortunes after years of underperformance.
In the aggressive growth category, the winner was MLC Horizon 7 Accelerated Growth Portfolio with returns of 9.3% per annum over five years while OnePath Optimix Balanced fared worst with returns of 2.8%.
For growth super funds, the winner was Qantas Super Growth with returns of 7.5% while Zurich Balanced returned 1.8%. Qantas Super Balanced was also best in the Balanced category with returns of 6.1% while Zurich Capital Stable returned just 0.5%.
In the moderate category, Qantas Super Conservative returned 4.5% while TAL Personal Superannuation Plan-TAL Capital Protected lost 0.8%.
Funds which did well this year stood out as being those which had a high proportion of unlisted assets in their funds which were less impacted by volatility. However, Stockspot questioned the lack of transparency around these assets and their valuation methodology and secondly, how these types of portfolios would perform over the long term.
“Hostplus and IFM, the wholesale fund holding many of the unlisted assets of Hostplus and other industry funds, vigorously defend the lack of disclosure claminig commercial sensitivity. However, industry funds and private equity bought Sydney Airport and Crown Casino because they believed those assets were undervalued by the market.
“The funds were able to make that assessment due to the disclosure required for listed assets. The same standard should be required for unlisted assets so that other potential investors can make their own assessment of the real value of those assets.”
You have to love Industry Funds quoting commercial sensitivity for their properties. So every other property fund that fully discloses this is going bankrupt or has no future? You can’t tell me that IFM have never looked at valuations of other property managers. Let’s be transparent and then compare returns – who knows we may be even able to compare the pair!!!!!