Our investment philosophy

When you’re choosing an investment manager, you should know how they approach the task of managing your money. Our investment philosophy is based on the following principles:

We seek to maximise returns for a given level of risk

We’re always looking for ways to increase returns but only within the risk constraints of your fund. If you’re in a defensive fund, it will always have a defensive risk profile. We look to identify market opportunities that best suit your investment strategy. For example, we save our more aggressive ideas for our high growth funds.

We search for multiple sources of beta

Beta is the return that is generated by the overall movement in a market, not by your choice of assets within that market. We believe that choosing the right markets and sectors to be in is just as important as choosing the right assets.

We select ‘best of breed’ investment managers

No single manager can outperform in all circumstances. We spend a lot of time recruiting managers based on very specific attributes and combining them into a cohesive portfolio designed to weather all market conditions.

We search for multiple sources of value add

We believe that asset allocation is the biggest single contributor to performance. We focus a lot of our time to looking at markets and trying to determine which asset class may be overvalued or undervalued in order to pursue the next opportunity.

Currency is another crucial element of our investment process. For example, in the case of overseas investments, currency management is crucial in determining favourable investment returns.

And finally, asset selection (choosing the right shares, bonds, property) can’t be ignored.

We maintain a high level of transparency and liquidity

We provide you with the reporting you need. More importantly, our combination of size and inflows means that our liquidity (the ability to redeem your money) is optimised. This means that ordinarily (depending on investment options chosen), you don’t need to worry about accessing your money as it is there if you need it.

We work hard to minimise investment costs

Excellent performance is meaningless if it’s destroyed by exorbitant investment costs. We work hard to ensure that more of the returns we generate end up in your account. Our investment teams are aligned with members’ needs, as our portfolio managers are assessed upon your net returns.

For more detail on what our investment philosophy means and how we put it into practice when managing your money, download our investment philosophy flyer.