Published by Australian FinTech
Australia is “at long last” becoming wise to the misinformation and false assumptions underlying traditional funds management, and robo-advice tools are the messenger.
That’s the view of Rich Lister and exchange-traded funds pioneer Graham Tuckwell, who has relocated to Australia permanently from Jersey and is launching his latest collaboration with a robo-advice challenger.
ETF Securities Australia, which was founded by Tuckwell in 2003 and launched the world’s first gold-backed exchange-traded commodity, will jointly list the SMSF Leaders ETF with online broker and investment adviser SelfWealth. The product was expected to start trading on the Australian Securities Exchange on Wednesday, but has been delayed by “administrative” hurdles.
Despite the delay, Mr Tuckwell believes the underlying investment philosophy of the fund reflects a new peer-to-peer zeitgeist in the ETF market, which is more sophisticated than traditional index-hugging funds.
Instead of mimicking the performance of broad indices like the S&P/ASX 200, ETF Securities’ new robo-advice collaboration will track the portfolio activity of the top 10 per cent of self-managed superannuation fund investors in Australia. It uses data supplied by SMSF administration software provider BGL and obtained exclusively by SelfWealth.
“If you can match what the best investors do then you actually can outperform the index,” Mr Tuckwell told The Australian Financial Review. “But it’s not active management, it’s just tracking the best strategies. It steals all their best ideas.”
