Best of the Best 2025: Best Growth Super Products
MLC Super Fund has been named Money's Best Growth Super Products as part of the Best of the Best awards.
Being overweight to unhedged global shares combined with the active management of Australian and global shares has led to stellar returns over one-, three-, five-, and 10-year periods for MLC Super Fund.
Its growth option is a long-only, geared multi-manager product that has exposure to a wide range of asset classes. It has followed through on its goal of delivering real risk-adjusted returns for members through a challenging market.
About half of the pie is invested in Australian shares. Some 67% is committed to global shares, 3% each in infrastructure and property while 7% is in private equity.
It targets an allocation of a 128%/2% split across growth and defensive assets, with 30% of the portfolio dedicated to gearing strategies.
Its top holdings in Australian shares include CBA, BHP, CSL, ANZ and Santos.
"Awards like this mean that we're doing the right thing by our clients and members by delivering strong investment returns," says MLC Asset Management chief investment officer Dan Farmer. "It's especially pleasing as the returns have been achieved in a period of steeper inflation and interest rates, something that's been largely absent since the 1980s. It demonstrates the all-seasons effectiveness of our unified investment approach."
MLC Super Fund's suite of portfolios has recently been refreshed following the combination of IOOF, MLC and ANZ Pensions and Investments, which now operate under the banner of Insignia Financial.
Farmer acknowledges that while strong, listed global and Australian equity returns have contributed significantly to the portfolio's performance, there have also been notable contribution from other building blocks.
"The portfolio has also benefited from its private equity exposure, global listed real estate and global listed infrastructure. As investment managers, we're risk managers, not risk avoiders, and we have been able to pull many levers over this market cycle to deliver strong returns for the MLC Aggressive portfolio."
The award is recognition of "how effectively and seamlessly three investment teams came together, three years ago, to form a strong, single investment team united under the MLC Asset Management banner", says Farmer.
"Many superannuation fund members put their trust in MySuper options judging, correctly, that fund trustees have devised appropriate investment strategies for default funds. However, there are also members who, because of their stage of life, circumstances or temperament, want to put their super into investment options with greater long-term potential returns than found in many MySuper options.
"Support for the MLC Aggressive portfolio is proof that such members represent a sizeable share of the member cohort. This portfolio uses borrowing to gear its exposure to more traditionally growth-focused assets that tend to provide higher levels of long-term capital growth."
Get stories like this in our newsletters.
