Morningstar has published interim results of the Morningstar® Australian Superannuation Survey, providing comprehensive coverage of the performance of Australian-offered retirement savings vehicles to 31 March 2013.
The Survey includes both commercial for-profit and industry superannuation options. Morningstar classifies funds according to a proprietary classification system created to facilitate meaningful peer-relative comparisons.
Key findings
- Growth superannuation funds struggled to record a positive return over the month of March. The median fund returned -0.4 percent. Individual results fell between a low of -0.9 percent and a high of 0.4 percent. Longer-term annualised results for the median growth fund were 11.8 percent over one year, 5.8 percent over three years, 3.2 percent over five years, and 6.9 percent over the 10 years to 31 March 2013.
- Growth assets provided a mixed bag of performance for multi-sector options over the month of March. Australian shares, as measured by the S&P/ASX300 Accumulation Index, fell -2.2 percent, international shares gained 0.6 percent, Australian property securities fell -2.7 percent, and global property securities gained 3.5 percent. International fixed interest returned 0.8 percent, but other defensive assets did not do particularly well – cash returned 0.2 percent and Australian fixed interest was down -0.2 percent.
- The superfunds in the Morningstar Multisector Growth category held an average allocation to equities of 57.8 percent at the end of February, split between Australian equities (31.9 percent) and international equities (25.9 percent), while the average allocation to property was 8.0 percent.
- The average allocation to defensive assets totalled 23.1 percent (9.8 percent domestic fixed interest, 5.9 percent international fixed interest, and 7.4 percent cash). Legg Mason Growth had the highest allocation to Australian shares (49.7 percent), followed by Legg Mason Balanced (43.6 percent), and BlackRock Diversified Growth (41.9 percent). The highest allocation to international shares was recorded by Zurich Managed Growth (37.0 percent), followed by CFS Growth (34.6 percent), and Care Super Sustainable Balanced (31.6 percent).
- The best-performing Growth superfunds over the three years to 31 March 2013 were Rest Core (8.0 percent), followed by Legg Mason Balanced (7.7 percent), Invesco Diversified Growth (7.5 percent), AustralianSuper Conservative Balanced (7.2 percent), and Legg Mason Growth (7.1 percent). Over the five years to 31 March, Schroder Superannuation (6.0 percent), followed by REST Super Core (5.8 percent) and REST Super Diversified (4.4 percent) come out on top.
- Among the options in the Multisector Balanced category (40.0 – 60.0 percent growth assets), the best performers over the three years to 31 March 2013 were AustralianSuper Stable (6.8 percent), followed by REST Super Balanced (6.6 percent), and Optimum Balanced Growth (6.1 percent).