Further allocations into international equities by SMSFs are expected in 2015 with the help of exchange-traded funds (ETF), however, the rate of growth will be dependent upon global market conditions.
“The economic situation is going to be the biggest [issue] going forward and whether things stay relatively stable, particularly Europe and China’s growth rate,” AMP SMSF Administration head of technical services Philip La Greca told selfmanagedsuper.
“My anticipation is that it will continue to climb. It will just be a question of the rate of that climb.
“Also we’ve got to acknowledge that more and more trustees need to recognise the issue of trying to diversify into other sectors.”
La Greca said the acceptance of ETFs as a mechanism to access overseas markets had played a significant role in the shift out of Australian equities.
“It’s a new way of accessing offshore investments and that’s been fairly important because we’re not [seeing] the difficulties investors have had to try to access international assets [this way],” he said.
“The other thing is that the labelling of ETFs shows very explicitly what type of equities they are buying, so it’s quite true to label.
“One of the problems is that different fund managers [have different definitions] of balanced funds, so they aren’t all the same.”
La Greca’s comments follow the release of the Multiport “SMSF Investment Patterns Survey” for the September quarter 2014.
The report found international share holdings were 11.7 per cent for the quarter, an increase from 9.2 per cent at 30 September 2013.
In addition, 17 per cent of overall international holdings were held via ETFs.
The survey included statistics from around 2500 SMSFs representing an asset level of $2.6 billion.
