Our investment philosophy
Maximising your investment returns, while protecting against large fluctuations.
Overview
Our investment philosophy guides our investment decisions to achieve sustainable, long-term growth.
At Spirit Super, we aim to deliver strong, risk-adjusted returns over time on your super. Here are the six core beliefs that guide the SPIRIT of our investment decisions.
Size
- We should leverage our size to competitive advantage.
- We should deliver genuine scale benefits over time without compromising on investment outcomes.
- We should be a responsible asset owner with best practice environmental, social, and governance (ESG) processes and play a leadership role where we have the capability and conviction.
Performance
- We should seek to build a strong performance culture with a clear focus on member outcomes.
- Every investment should present a compelling reward for risk, cost, and complexity.
- Strong governance, including clear decision rights and accountability, is critical to our success.
Innovation
- We should be brave, pursue a first principles (evidence-based) strategy with a crawl-walk-run approach to new things.
- We should remain future-focused as the investing environment evolves.
- We should build networks to expand our opportunity set across illiquid, complex, and skill-based strategies.
Resilience
- Super funds are in the business of taking risk – a deep understanding of risk and uncertainty is therefore critical to success.
- We believe diversification is always our first and most effective line of defense.
- But we must also remain attuned to peer risk (and the collective wisdom of peers), build incipience and adapt quickly to change.
Intermediaries
We should seek to minimize our exposure to agency risk through:
- developing well-aligned external relationships and deeper partnerships
- getting closer to the market by building internal capability.
Time
We should be a patient investor given our longer time horizons, including:
- recognise the central role of the strategic asset allocation and, by extension, the equity, liquidity, and other risk premia over time
- set appropriate time frames for assessing active strategies to avoid portfolio churn.