Industry Funds outperform Retail Funds

The financial press has recently noted that Industry funds have outperformed their retails counterparts (outperformed in the sense of lost less) by almost 6% in respect of 2008, while for previous years the outperformance was 2%.

One reason (as speculated in the press) for the outperformance is that industry funds contain a much higher level of assets which are unlisted – such as large commercial or industrial real estate and private equity investments (ie substantial investments in non-listed companies).

Given the general demise in asset values, some speculate that values of non-listed property and equity investments will eventually be adversely affected and so the performance gap will reduce and may even reverse.