Hostplus

“About half of the first time job entrance belong to those two funds, and every other super fund in the country gets the other half.”

“How much money do you earn? How many kids do you have? What schools do they go to? What are the school fees like? At what stage are you at? What car do you drive? Is it mortgaged? There's a whole set of, you have a right not to answer those questions, but you'…”

“In fact, if you look at Host Plus's website, you won't see too many brand names across any asset class, because we don't invest in brands We invest in individuals.”

“Internally, the board has formed a small subcommittee of four directors, which we call the SIG, the Special Investment Group, and they can be called on demand On a deal by deal basis. And they can get together and work with the internal team and have a delegat…”

“If you know why you make an investment, then you have a ready-made reason to get out of it if that reason changes. Performance is never one of them.”

“The board makes all investment decisions. Our job is to work with Jana, our asset consultant. And prepare the case, if you like. Think of the board like a jury.”

“So over the last 20 financial years, Host Plus has been top quartile in 16 of them.”

“Including Hostplus putting 1.2 billion dollars into venture capital, which makes Hostplus the biggest Australian institutional investor super fund in venture capital by a long shot”

“We own two asset management firms. So, 20 or so industry funds, and almost 30 or so industry funds own IFM, Industry Fund Management Advisors, or IFM Advisors, and who does infrastructure globally, and another entity, ISPT, Industry Super Property Trust, who d…”

“The investment staff is currently 18 people, but we do not manage any money in-house. At this point in time, we prefer to outsource all money management”

“Boutique is better. Hungry is better. Having a business risk is better.”

“We have a 180,000 contributing employers and 1.2 million members. Average age, 34.”

“In the frontline investment people, operations has had, you'd expect to have some turnover in the operations, but we've never lost an investment person. It's been cumulative, but it's never gone the other way.”

“How do you justify the fact that if you're managing a bond portfolio or an equities portfolio and you're trading, that the fee goes up in a linear way, more or less, if I give you five hundred million or a billion or three billion? Surely it should plateau At …”

“And in some asset classes, like private equity in general, or private markets, but private equity in particular, without a relationship, we won't do the investment. Relationships are 95% of the driving force. People underestimate how important relationships ar…”

“So we view hedge funds playing that role rather than protecting the portfolio from The volatility of equity markets. Our unlisted assets have that role.”

“So the temptation to invest in infrastructure assets that are generating six percent returns, therefore diluting your portfolio return, Is huge. But you should resist that temptation. That is not a good idea to go down that path. It's better to find some other…”

“Today, Host Plus is forty two billion dollars in size, and so you can see that over a short 10 year period, that growth has been Remarkable.”

“So for Host Plus, our return objectives are inflation plus four percent per annum over 20 year periods.”

“The real issue is that pension funds were designed at times when people retired at age 65 and conveniently died at age 68. Today, people retire at 65 or 70 and live to a 108. How are you going to survive 30 or 40 years not working, not generating an income, li…”

“53% of our strategic asset allocation is public equities, listed equities. It's a combination of domestic equities and international equities developed markets and international equities emerging markets. 53% in total. The other 47% is unlisted infrastructure,…”

“You can leave money on the table by not implementing Investments properly, by not implementing board decisions properly, by not structuring vehicles properly, by not taking into account tax and other obligations that we have, FX, settlements, et cetera, proper…”