Nick’s Corner

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I am a big fan of the benefits of benchmarking in any field, as it helps people and organisations to achieve better outcomes.

To help self-managed super fund investors keep an eye on what’s been going on in various sectors of investment markets we have created a League Ladder of Asset Class Performance, and we will make this freely available from our website.

Each month we rank the performance of 26 asset classes and sub-asset-classes. What’s been working well for you? Could you have included something with your current approach that would have made a difference in the 12 months to 30 April 2017?

If you are a contrarian investor, which have been the worst performing sectors which may now be representing the best opportunities?

From the table below you can see that Australian Resources had a good year, with a total return of 19.27 per cent. This was a higher return than Australian High-Yield companies and Australian Residential property.

At the same time, there were seven other asset classes thsat had a better return than Australian resources over the period. Do you know what they are, or why they had such a strong year, or what’s likely to happen from here?

International fixed interest (hedged) was a poor performer over this period, but there were two sectors which were worse. Curious to know what they are?

Contact us as SMSF Benchmarks and we’ll send you the full table.

We use a basket of exchange traded funds to measure the performance of various asset classes and sub-asset classes. These funds are a good proxy for an index because each of the ETFs we use may be tracking a different index within each sector, so our basket maximises diversity and reduces risk.

It also has the advantage that it is investible. You can invest in the basket of ETFs but you can’t invest in something abstract like an index.

 

Nick Shugg is the chief executive of SMSF Benchmarks, an on-line service designed to give SMSF trustees better information about how their fund is going. He has worked in the finance industry for 30 years, including as an adviser for 19 of these years.

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