Keeping you up to date with how we invest

It's also important that you have confidence in how we’re growing your retirement savings, so we've developed comprehensive information about our investment philosophy and how it benefits you.

Our investment purpose: your comfortable retirement

We’ve set ourselves a goal to ensure you’re funded to a ‘comfortable retirement standard’ by the time you turn 65. Currently, the proportion of the general Australian population estimated to be on track to reach this standard is currently around 25% and projected to increase to 50% by 2050¹.

How we’re tracking on our goal differs between our schemes, but at least 72% of our full time customers are expected to be on track—the rate is over 90% for our PSS, CSS and MilitarySuper customers.

Let's talk about investment risk

Our products are true to label

We have four investment options—aggressive, income-focused, cash and balanced. If you haven’t made a switch to your investment strategy, or you’re in a scheme that doesn’t allow switches, you’ll be invested in our balanced option.

Aggressive and Income-focused

These options take on a higher risk level compared to comparable options offered by other funds. They have consistently been in the top quartile of funds for net risk adjusted returns in their peer category for all time periods up to 31 October 2020¹. These investments are likely to fluctuate over shorter horizons, but are more likely to grow your savings sustainably, if you have a longer time to retirement.

Cash

Our ‘cash’ option focuses on preserving your money, so it’s expected to have lower risk and lower return compared to other options. If your preference is to protect the wealth you've built, without worrying about growth, the ‘cash’ option may be appropriate for you.

Balanced

This option has a greater diversification of risk than most peers. It purposefully takes less risk than the other comparable 'balanced' options offered by other funds in the industry². That's because we’re protecting your funds and ensuring we actually provide a balanced exposure to risk—to protect your money as well as growing it.

We manage the downside

Because of our intentionally balanced exposure to risk, we effectively reduce the ‘retirement date risk’ that most Australians are forced to take on as their own responsibility. For example, if you’d retired in early- to mid-2020 when markets fell around March 2020 due to COVID-19, your savings with us wouldn’t have fallen as much as other funds suffered during the same period³.

Read more about how we manage that downside risk for you.

Our Investment Philosophy

We focus on risk-adjusted returns

Curious about what ‘risk-adjusted returns’ means? We've created a video to help you understand.

It's an important concept, because we believe 'risk-adjusted returns net of fees' are what ultimately matters to your retirement.

We don't simply take on more risk to chase potentially more returns, and our historical investment performance has been very competitive⁴. We've delivered retirement outcomes with greater certainty and less volatility or risk than the average fund.

Please note that past performance is not a reliable indicator of future performance.

The relevant investment horizon is your lifetime

Many people compare fund performance using an arbitrary measure of 1, 5 or 10 years and make decisions about where to invest their super. Ultimately, the results in these performance lists vary significantly depending on the market environment at the date of the report, and you can see random changes month-to-month and quarter-to-quarter.

This highlights the importance of viewing your investment horizon as your own lifetime.

For us, that means building an adequate income for retirement for you, and focusing on your long-term retirement outcomes rather than comparing fees or returns alone.