Dan Farmer, chief investment officer of MLC Asset Management, has detailed how its super fund allocations have evolved and whether the fund will consider investing in bitcoin.
Speaking at a breakfast in Sydney, Farmer discussed the asset allocation on its $86 billion
superannuation fund.
He said: “We’ve got some asset classes that other super funds might not have, we have some uncorrelated assets and some insurance-related securities. On the flip side, we don’t have gold as a separate asset class and that’s been a very hot topic, we get exposure to gold through businesses.
“On private credit, that probably wasn’t a big asset class if you turn the clock back five years but today they are big parts of the portfolio, it’s about finding assets which are less correlated with your traditional equities and bonds and trying to find new asset classes.
“Data centres are also now a big part of our unlisted infrastructure portfolio, that wasn’t an asset class that 10 years ago to any great extent so the portfolio is always evolving.”
He also elaborated on whether the fund would ever hold exposure to cryptocurrency bitcoin.
Earlier this year, AMP Super stated it was exploring using crypto ETFs in its portfolio, having already added bitcoin futures.
Speaking at the Australian Wealth Management Summit in August, AMP head of portfolio
management, Stuart Eliot, said that one of the trigger points for AMP Super deciding to allocate a small exposure to this asset class was the approval of crypto ETF products by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the US.
“That event gave the asset class institutional legitimacy and that triggered us to conduct research into whether we could build effective trade models for that. That took about three months and we then got all the necessary approvals to go live,” said Eliot.
But for MLC’s Farmer, he believed cryptocurrency was still in its infancy to be considered for exposure.
“The one that’s waxing and waning for us is things like Bitcoin which is a digital version of gold. We don’t have Bitcoin in the asset mix at the moment for a whole bunch of reasons, we don’t think it is mature enough yet but I won’t say we are never going to do anything and will look at it,” Farmer said.
