SMSFs underperform
The Monash Centre for Financial Studies has released a study on the performance of SMSF investors’ direct Australian equity allocations. They found that the average SMSF in the (extensive) SelfWeath database took more risk and had lower returns.
Our research revealed that SMSFs’ Australian equities portfolios had low levels of diversification and liquidity and many did not beat the market.
Cui, Pham and Rubath 2021, Is there wisdom within the crowd?
The return gap was about 3% over long periods, which is a similar return gap to those found in other studies overseas.
They also found style bias in SMSF holdings, with SMSFs overweight small stocks, low volatility stocks and high dividend yield stocks, and underweight quality, value and momentum.
This is another study that shows that although its hard to outperform the market, it’s easy to underperform it without a well thought out investment strategy. That may sound glib, but if markets were truly efficient a random portfolio ought to perform as well as any other on average. These results suggest the opposite is true.
You can access the full paper here.
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Please note that past performance is not a reliable indicator of future performance.
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