If you haven’t checked your KiwiSaver balance lately, now might be a good time.
While investors were told to look away and try not to think about it when markets wobbled in April, they have since recovered significantly – and fund managers say some people haven’t even realised.
Morningstar data shows all but the aggressive KiwiSaver category is back to where it was at the start of 2024, but even that is not far from it.
Someone who put $10,000 into an aggressive fund at the start of the year would have $9957 now, based on the benchmarks that Morningstar uses to track the fund categories.
In a growth fund, they would have $10,002, in a balanced fund $10,041, in a moderate fund $10.081 and a conservative fund $10,114.
Compared to the end of 2023, balances are much higher.
That same $10,000 put into an aggressive fund at the end of 2023 would be worth $12,204 now, even with the volatility of this year.
It would be worth $11,734 in a growth fund, $11,411 in a balanced fund, $11,022 in a moderate fund and $10,712 in a conservative fund.
‘So much negativity’
Koura founder Rupert Carlyon said markets were back at all-time highs, but there had been little attention paid to it.
“When we’re talking to people, they don’t believe us, when we tell them the markets have recovered,” he said. “There’s so much negativity in New Zealand, they think there’s no way the markets are back where they were.”
He said it might be helpful for the New Zealand economy and consumer confidence, if people realised their investments were probably performing better than they expected.
Fisher Funds international equities manager Harry Smith said, if investors had not noticed the rebound, it was probably due to loss aversion.
Research has shown people tend to feel investment losses more acutely than they do a comparable gain.
“We do sort of seem to not think about things as much when all is going well, but we always think about it in terms of when the equity market does drop.”
He said that was heightened for KiwiSaver, because people could log in and see their balances at any time. Other assets, such as a house, might also be changing in value, but most people would be unaware, because the information was not as transparent and available.
“You know where your savings are or what your KiwiSaver is at any moment in time, with a slight delay of a day or two,” he said. “Your home would go up or down in price as well, depending on what’s going on with the economy, inflation, interest rates.
“Over time, just like the sharemarket, your home goes up in price generally, but we don’t have that available to us and we don’t think about it in the same context as we do our KiwiSaver.”
He said, over the past seven years, there had been three bear markets, with a drop of more than 20 percent, when normally that level of drop would only be expected every 5-6 years.
“During that period, investors have had really healthy returns. Over the last seven years from today, the global equities market delivered nearly 10.5 percent annual return, even with that volatility, so if you’re a long term investor, you’re getting a really healthy return in equity markets.”
Smith said a key reason for the market rebound was the pause on US trade tariffs and a recovery in some AI stocks that had significantly fallen earlier in the year.
Pie Funds chief executive Ana-Marie Lockyer said it was a bit like petrol prices.
“When petrol prices spike, everyone notices,” she said. “It gets picked up in the media and people may even change their buying behaviour.
“When prices ease back down, it barely registers. There’s no headline saying, ‘Petrol prices normal again’.
“Similarly, people open their KiwiSaver app when the news is bad, but not necessarily when it’s good.”
