What’s it take to be super fund of the year?

“Going forward, we continue to be very diversified. This is supported by rotating away from passive to be slightly more active, such as with equities, this year.”

Fisher says another of the “really important high-level principles” around ART’s whole investment strategy and approach is continually asking itself, ‘what are our comparative advantages, how can we consistently add value in markets?’ “It doesn’t rely on us being smarter than everybody else, because I am pretty confident you get to interview lots of people and they all sound really smart,” he says. “But we like to think we have some comparative advantages to them, like our scale and having cash flows that are stronger than theirs. Our liquidity and our cash flow is one of our biggest advantages, biggest differentiators.”

This translates into investment benefits, he says. “Something that permeates across all of our investments is extracting value from our liquidity. We do this by being a liquidity provider to markets rather than a liquidity taker, as we are very large. We have a liquidity advantage versus competitors and this is how we monetise that for our members. 

“In the tactical sense, what that means is that if you’re a liquidity provider, it means you’re following a valuation-based approach,” he  explains. “For example, high volatility, which we’re experiencing right now, is good for mean-reverting value-type approaches. 

“During big market falls, we will buy; big market rallies, we will sell into. In other words, if everyone’s selling, we’re a buyer, and if everyone’s buying, we’re a seller. When the market falls, we have cash to invest and can take advantage of lower prices”. Similarly, when there are big rises in asset prices, he says, ART sells and seeks value elsewhere. 

Fisher also spoke about the importance of benchmarks. “We spend a lot of time and effort trying to construct the benchmark that we think is reflective of an average super fund – and we try and beat that. We don’t worry about what everyone else is doing. We regularly review whether or not our benchmark is a reasonable reflection of the universe and it tends to match pretty well. We then try and beat it as consistently and as with as low risk as we possibly can.” 

Importance of discipline

Fisher believes both discipline and accountability are under-rated. “You will face some real challenges and having a discipline and a construct and a framework which says, ‘no’ if this happens is really important,” he says. “Having a framework, having a set of beliefs, having a disciplined approach to follow is valuable.”

He notes the drivers of ART’s outperformance have demonstrated the benefits of diversification over the past few years. From 2021-2022, outperformance was driven by private equity, where “we tend to have more than most”, he says. Through 2022-203 the big driver was in alternatives, real estate and core infrastructure for inflation protection.  The benefits of diversification were further illustrated in 2024, with Australian equities, along with local infrastructure, driving outperformance. Last year saw infrastructure continuing to add value through asset selection, led by the successful Airtrunk data centre transaction. Looking forward, ART is seeking to add further value by being more active in response to rising volatility.

This has seen a more dynamic mix of tactical asset allocation, says Fisher, along with longer strategic asset allocations. 

When Sunsuper merged with QSuper in 2022 to form ART, Fisher was head of portfolio strategy at Sunsuper. He has since played an important role in the development of a team that now boasts of over 150 investment professionals. 

As for performance, Fisher says “We aim to be top-quartile, which we’ve delivered most years over the past 10;  when you add it up, it adds up to #1, #2, #3 super fund over those 10-year rolling periods, which we think is a better measure of the outcomes we’re delivering to members. If you keep delivering, compounding consistent outperformance and avoiding underperformance years, then you’ll deliver the results over the long term.”

ART’s Super Savings Socially Conscious Balanced option topped the market with a 10.6% return last year and its High Growth option achieved a 9.83% a year return over 10 years (to 31 Dec 2025).

Fisher acknowledges that “members don’t choose ART solely because of investments and we can’t deliver the results that we do with the support of the entire ART team. Our strategic advantages in terms of scale and cashflows don’t just happen, it happens because members choose ART and that it’s because of the servicing that the team does. They choose it because of the awareness that they have of us through marketing campaigns and to our advice team going out and talking to advisers.”

The Morningstar Fund Manager Awards recognise funds and asset managers that Morningstar’s research team believes are able to deliver strong risk-adjusted returns over time. It noted Antipodes had generated top-tier, risk-adjusted, medium-to-long-term performance as a result of its robust research. 

Matt Olsen, Morningstar Australasia’s director of manager research, says the award-winning “managers demonstrated an ability to deliver quality, high-performing investments and have stood above peers with exceptional returns over the longer term.”