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Media and Insights Filter by Tags About Aurellan Equities Kiwisaver Markets Media Podcast Portfolio Construction Private Assets Tax Wilshire 14 Oct 2026 Anthony Edmonds appears on "Beat the bank" podcast Anthony Edmonds appears as a guest on the “Beat the bank” podcast series and talks about his career, the businesses he has built, Aurellan, and the importance of smart portfolio construction. Read More About Aurellan, Portfolio Construction, Podcast 6 Oct 2026 KiwiSaver investors are taking on more risk, what it could mean for the next crisis 55% of investors now in Growth and Aggressive Funds. Would the downside scenarios come as a surprise? Read More Kiwisaver, Portfolio Construction, Equities 1 Oct 2026 Media round up - October 2026 A quick round-up of some recent news stories featuring Aurellan. Read More Media, Kiwisaver, Portfolio Construction, Equities, Private Assets 18 Sept 2026 The SPIVA NZ Scorecard's own methodology, applied to passive NZ equity funds, produces the same flawed result SPIVA's new mid-year Scorecard says 80% of active New Zealand equity funds “underperformed” the S&P/NZX 50 Index. Applying the same method to passive funds built to track the market produces a number that is just as striking, and just as unreliable. Read More Portfolio Construction, Equities 6 Sept 2026 Index-washing: how dirty data pollutes the NZ active (and passive) environment NZ global equity managers have been put through the SPIVA wringer and judged sub-par. But Aurellan Asset Management co-founder, Anthony Edmonds, finds the indexer is not playing clean… Read More Portfolio Construction, Equities 3 Sept 2026 Passive investing with a large dash of active hypocrisy Why lots of investment managers and market participants drive revenue by dismissing active management while actively encouraging you to do it anyway, for a fee! Read More Portfolio Construction, Equities 21 Jul 2026 Aurellan Intergenerational Thinking Podcast: Talking private markets with Wilshire's Mark Perry Mark Perry covers the key trends among private market investors in the US Read More Podcast, Private Assets, Wilshire 29 Jun 2026 Aurellan Intergenerational Thinking Podcast: Backing the next generation of NZ companies What does it take to back the companies shaping New Zealand's future? Read More Podcast, Private Assets 5 Jun 2026 Don't let tax be the one that got away Anthony reflects on how he tackles tax within his own family investments. Read More Tax, Portfolio Construction 29 May 2026 The investment tax hack Sir Michael Cullen probably never meant to give us Budget 2026 doubles a threshold that has sat untouched for years, and in doing so creates a once-in-a-generation opportunity for long-term investors in New Zealand. Read More Tax, Portfolio Construction, Equities 19 May 2026 Currency: friend, not foe Foreign currency hedging often fits into the camp of too complex, too hard, or even too boring, Aurellan's CEO and CIO Chris Di Leva puts forward the case on why it is a super important piece of the portfolio construction puzzle. Read More Portfolio Construction 16 Apr 2026 Aurellan Intergenerational Thinking Podcast: Chris Di Leva and Anthony Edmonds talk global equity style diversification What investment styles have been in and out of favour? Read More Podcast, Portfolio Construction, Equities 25 Mar 2026 Our take on the medium term outlook Thoughts from Aurellan’s CEO and CIO Chris Di Leva on the current state of play in investment markets and what this means in the medium term for investors. Read More Markets 12 Mar 2026 Aurellan Intergenerational Thinking Podcast featuring Causeway Capital CEO Sarah Ketterer The ups and downs of 25 years of value investing Read More Podcast, Portfolio Construction, Equities 11 Feb 2026 Aurellan Intergenerational Thinking Podcast: Cotality's Nick Goodall and Rachel Weld Are property prices on the mend? or is it a case of one bitten, twice shy? Read More Podcast 23 Dec 2025 Outlook 2026: Five questions that could shape 2026 and beyond Aurellan have compiled a team of experts to discuss the key long term themes that could drive markets in the coming years Read More Markets, Portfolio Construction 25 Nov 2025 Aurellan Intergenerational Thinking Podcast featuring Chris Di Leva Aurellan co-founder and CEO Chris Di Leva is interviewed by Anthony Edmonds. Chris and Anthony talk about Chris' path to Aurellan including learnings from his role as Portfolio Manager at Mercer and Head of Global and Multi Asset Investments at Harbour Asset Management. Read More Podcast, About Aurellan 17 Nov 2025 Aurellan Intergenerational Thinking Podcast featuring Wilshire's Head of Manager Research Aurellan CEO and CIO, Chris Di Leva, interviews Wilshire's Head of Manager Research, Rob Noe. Rob talked about how Wilshire goes about selecting managers for its US$1.5 trillion client base. Read More Podcast, Portfolio Construction, Wilshire, About Aurellan 3 Nov 2025 The shark already has teeth: Looking at the facts around capital gains tax in NZ A dead shark can still bite — and so can New Zealand’s tax system. Our latest article unpacks why the real question isn’t “should we have a capital-gains tax?” but “how far will Inland Revenue go with the one we already have?” Read More Portfolio Construction, Tax, Equities 21 Oct 2025 Aurellan Intergenerational Thinking Podcast featuring co-Founder Campbell Gower In this second episode of the Aurellan Podcast, Campbell shares how he helped build enduring New Zealand brands like Charlie’s Juice, Mountain Buggy and phil&teds — and why the Gower Family Office chose to back Aurellan Asset Management. Read More Podcast, About Aurellan 17 Oct 2025 Why the case for NZ shares isn't dead yet New Zealand shares have struggled to keep up with global shares. But are there still benefits to the NZ share market? Read More Portfolio Construction, Equities 10 Oct 2025 Aurellan Intergenerational Thinking Podcast featuring co-Founder Anthony Edmonds Aurellan CEO and CIO, Chris Di Leva interviews fellow co-Founder Anthony Edmonds. This conversation covers Anthony's lucky break which got him into investments to founding and exiting three successful investment businesses. Read More Podcast, About Aurellan 14 Sept 2025 Edmonds, Di Leva venture brings $1.5 trillion US firm to NZ investors The new investment firm founded by Anthony Edmonds and Chris Di Leva has confirmed the US-headquartered Wilshire Advisors as its global partner. Read More Media, Wilshire, About Aurellan 20 Aug 2025 Di Leva, Edmonds partner in new investment management business - Investment News After months of speculation, former Apex NZ chief, Anthony Edmonds, has emerged with a new investment management firm to be headed by ex Harbour multi-asset specialist, Chris Di Leva. Read More Media, About Aurellan

< Back Currency: friend, not foe Chris Di Leva, CFA 19 May 2026 Foreign currency hedging often fits into the camp of too complex, too hard, or even too boring, Aurellan's CEO and CIO Chris Di Leva puts forward the case on why it is a super important piece of the portfolio construction puzzle. Ask most people about currency and you will hear the same word: risky. And in many ways, it is. Exchange rates are volatile, notoriously hard to forecast, and potentially unkind to anyone who tries to pick them with conviction. But inside a diversified investment portfolio, currency plays a very different role. For a small open economy like New Zealand, having exposure to foreign currencies is not just a sensible diversifier, it can be a genuine superpower. That is not the convention you will hear from every adviser, and it sits uncomfortably with the instinctive desire to "remove the currency risk" especially as this is often the right approach within companies that have offshore earnings. This piece sets out why we think the right question is not whether it is appropriate to have foreign currency exposure within investment portfolios, but rather how much. Also, we touch on why the answer for a New Zealand investor looks very different to the one that a textbook might give or apply for an Australian investor. The Kiwi dollar is not the US dollar There is an old saying that when the United States sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold. For a small open economy like ours, the impact on the currency tends to be rather more violent than a mild midwinter sniffle, and more like being knocked flat by influenza in the middle of haymaking. When the appetite for taking risk collapses globally, capital tends to flow out of higher-beta currencies like the New Zealand dollar and into perceived safe havens currencies like the US dollar, the Japanese yen, and the Swiss franc. The NZ dollar often doesn’t just drift lower in these episodes, rather it can drop sharply and quickly. For a Kiwi investor who holds global shares, that fall in the Kiwi dollar is the silver lining: foreign assets denominated in USD, EUR or GBP are suddenly worth more in New Zealand dollar terms, cushioning the equity drawdown. That cushion is real, it is sizeable, and as we will show, it has shown up reliably in the two biggest market shocks of the past two decades. The carry that was, and the carry that is not For many years, New Zealand investors hedging their offshore exposure were paid handsomely to do so. The mechanism is the "carry" or “forward points”. When you hedge a foreign asset back to NZ dollar, you are effectively borrowing the foreign currency and depositing it in NZ dollars. Because historically New Zealand interest rates were higher than those in the US, Europe, Japan and most other places that Kiwis invest, investors who hedged pocketed the differential in short-term interest rates as a tailwind. Put simply, within currency prices investors were getting paid interest to hedge, albeit invisibly, which is the “carry”. This tailwind “carry” was generous. From the early 2000’s through to around 2016, the implied yield pick-up from hedging global equities back to NZ dollars comfortably averaged more than 2% per annum, and at the height of the GFC briefly touched 6%. It was a meaningful enough sweetener that some New Zealand fund managers argued the carry alone justified 100% hedging any offshore equities back into NZ dollars. However, as the graph shows, the picture today is very different. The line above (which is the “carry”) has been below 2% since 2016 and has spent much of the recent past hovering at, or below, zero. This reflects that in recent times our Reserve Bank was cutting cash rates in NZ, while the Federal Reserve was hiking. Meaning the long-standing premium that compensated New Zealanders for parking their money offshore has been worn away. Hedging back to NZ dollars is no longer a "free lunch" and in some periods like now, has been at a small cost. That single chart undermines the strongest historical argument for high hedging ratios. If the carry is gone, the case for hedging must stand on its diversification merits alone, and in that case, as it turns out, is weaker than many investors assume. The downside-protection benefit, in numbers One theory is that hedging currency risk back to NZ dollars provides downside protection to investors. However, while theory is one thing, the track record of this is another. We looked at the MSCI ACWI in unhedged NZ dollar terms versus the fully hedged version of the same index, using monthly returns over the past twenty years. Period / metric MSCI ACWI Unhedged NZD MSCI ACWI Hedged Difference GFC bear market (Nov 2007 – Feb 2009) –31.3% –47.7% +16.4% Worst single month (Oct 2008) –8.1% –16.6% +8.5% COVID quarter (Q1 2020) –10.5% –20.1% +9.6% March 2026 –2.4% –6.6% +4.2% Annualised volatility, trailing 5 years 10.5% 13.2% -2.7% Annualised volatility, trailing 10 years 11.1% 13.3% –2.2% Annualised volatility, trailing 20 years 12.0% 14.0% –2.0% Source: MSCI, Aurellan Asset Management calculations. Returns are total returns in NZD and fully-hedged NZD respectively. Volatility figures are annualised standard deviations of monthly returns over the trailing 5, 10 and 20 years to 31 March 2026. Three episodes do most of the heavy lifting in this argument. During the GFC bear market, holding global equities unhedged saved a New Zealand investor more than sixteen percentage points compared with a fully hedged position (that is 16%!). In October 2008 alone, the worst single month of the crisis, the hedged index fell 16.6%, while the unhedged NZ dollar version fell just 8.1%. The Kiwi dollar did roughly half the work of the equity rally that eventually followed. The pattern repeated in the March 2020 quarter, when COVID hit markets. The hedged MSCI ACWI lost 20.1% over those three months, while the unhedged NZ dollar version of the same index only lost 10.5%. That is nearly ten percentage points of downside protection delivered by the currency in a single quarter. This protection arrived precisely when investors needed it most. And it is not just a "crisis-era" phenomenon. In the most recent down month of our dataset, March 2026, the hedged MSCI ACWI fell 6.6%. Unhedged investors lost 2.4%. The cushion was smaller in absolute terms, consistent with the lower volatility of the Kiwi today, but it was the same direction and the same mechanism. And the cushion is not just an episodic phenomenon, as it shows up in the long-run volatility figures too. Over the past 10 years, the unhedged NZ dollar version of the MSCI ACWI ran at an annualised volatility of 11.1%, against 13.3% for the fully hedged version. Over 20 years the gap is similar: 12.0% versus 14.0% per annum. On the face of it this is counterintuitive, as adding a second source of risk (the currency) on top of equity risk should make things more volatile, not less. The reason it does not is exactly the mechanism above: because the NZ dollar tends to fall when global equities fall, the unhedged investor gets a partial offset that reduces, rather than amplifies, total portfolio volatility. Currency is doing real work in terms of the diversification benefits it provides, rather than just adding noise. That said, the cushion is not symmetric across every shock. There are episodes, like the dot-com bust being the obvious example, where the source of the equity weakness is the US itself. In this situation the US dollar weakens rather than strengthens, and the NZ dollar rises against it. In these windows, historically unhedged investors have experienced more pain, not less. The lower long-run volatility tells you the diversification works on average and across most environments; it does not tell you it works in every environment. Which is exactly why neither extreme is the right answer. Our liabilities are not all in New Zealand dollars Step back from the charts and theory for a moment and think about what New Zealanders actually consume and produce. Our biggest export, dairy, is auctioned in US dollars on the Global Dairy Trade platform. The oil and petroleum that moves our country is priced in US dollars. Coal, gas, fertiliser and most globally traded soft commodities are priced and typically settled in US dollars. Imported manufactured goods, electronics and increasingly cloud computing and software-as-a-service are all priced in US dollars, as are even the blue cod that my father caught commercially in the Cook Strait, which is something I have been lamenting since he retired. Put another way, a meaningful portion of a New Zealand household's real cost of living is fundamentally a US dollar liability dressed up in NZ dollar clothing. When the Kiwi dollar falls, the cost of filling the car, eating blue cod, and buying anything with a microchip in it, goes up. Holding some unhedged foreign currency is not exotic risk-taking; it is a natural offset to a US dollar-denominated cost base most of us already carry without realising it. Prudent risk management for a small open economy is having your assets in more than one currency. If everything you own, everything you spend and everything you owe sits in the same currency, you have concentration risk, even if the line on the chart looks comforting. At the risk of sounding like an actuary, not that there is anything wrong with that, in its purest form, successful investing is all about liability matching, such as making sure investors can fund their retirement spending, while charities and foundations can continue to make grants. Therefore, it makes sense that prudent risk management for a small open economy is having your assets in more than one currency. If everything you own, everything you spend and everything you owe sits in the same currency, and your liabilities are driven by another currency, you have a potential problem. What does the industry actually do? Ask a New Zealand fund manager what hedge ratio they run for global equities and the modal answer is around 50%. The BNZ FX Hedging Survey, which we think is the most comprehensive look at industry practice, found exactly that. It shows on average there is a 50% hedging ratio for international shares across KiwiSaver providers, superannuation schemes and fund managers. That is not a coincidence, nor is it laziness. Fifty per cent is the "point of least regret": the position you can live with regardless of which direction the currency moves, and the one that has historically delivered the highest risk-adjusted return for a New Zealand investor in global equities. Across the Tasman and the answer is very different. APRA data shows that Australian superannuation funds, on average, hedge only around 22% of their international equity exposure, meaning that roughly three-quarters of it sits unhedged. And it is not because Australians have less offshore exposure within their portfolios to worry about. If anything, the opposite is true. Australian super funds now hold more than 50% of their total assets offshore for the first time in the sector's history, with international shares typically a larger allocation than domestic shares. So, the gap with New Zealand is entirely a question of hedging policy, not equity allocation. Why such different answers to the same question? At first glance this divergence is puzzling. The Australian and New Zealand dollars are about the most closely correlated pair of currencies in the G10. Daily moves in our currencies typically correlate above 0.85, reflecting both are commodity-linked, both are smaller/higher-beta currencies, and both fall against the US dollar in genuine risk-off episodes. If the structural story were just "small open economy with a risk-on currency", you would expect Kiwi and Aussie investors to land in roughly the same place. They do not. So, what is driving the gap? At Aurellan we think there are several things, which are all real, but none individually decisive. Firstly, the Australian dollar has historically been the cleaner version of this trade. It is a much more liquid currency, sits closer to the centre of global foreign exchange markets, and has had a longer and stronger inverse relationship with global equity drawdowns. Australian funds have been able to get most of their downside protection from leaving US dollar assets unhedged, with less need for an active overlay. The Kiwi has been a noisier proxy for the same trade, which arguably justifies a more deliberate hedge structure - rather than relying on the currency to do all the work. Secondly, the carry economics have run in opposite directions. For most of the past decade, hedging Australian dollars has not offered Australian investors with a meaningful interest rate pickup (“carry”). This reflects that in lots of periods the Reserve Bank of Australia has run their cash rates below the US Federal Reserve, meaning that hedging has resulted in a small negative drag or “carry”. The structural argument for hedging Australian-side was therefore weaker than it was in New Zealand during the long high-NZ-interest rates period. Now that New Zealand's “carry” has also disappeared, that gap has narrowed, but a couple of decades of muscle memory does not simply unwind in two years. Thirdly, scale matters. With a A$3.7 trillion sector in Australia, the operational cost, collateral management and counterparty drag of running large FX hedge books is non-trivial. This is reflected by the fact that the Australian regulator has been increasingly attentive to liquidity stress under sharp Australian dollar moves, but a lot of the institutional preference for low hedging is simply that it is cheaper and simpler not to. The New Zealand industry, smaller and with more vanilla balance sheets, has historically accepted that cost. Fourth, the underlying liability structure is different. Australia is a much larger and more vertically integrated commodity exporter, with these including iron ore, LNG, coal with most of those revenues invoiced in US dollars. A meaningful share of corporate Australia is effectively long the US dollar already. Households are less directly US dollar-exposed than the corporate sector, and the franking credit regime plus a deep, broadly diversified domestic equity market reduce the need to look offshore in the first place. New Zealand sits in a different spot: a smaller, more import-dependent economy where the household US dollar liability (fuel, dairy, imported goods, software-as-a-service) is the dominant exposure, and where the domestic equity market is too concentrated and too small to anchor a diversified portfolio. And fifth, honestly, there is a degree of institutional convention within the industry. The "point of least regret" at 50% has become the default starting point for the New Zealand industry, while in Australia, the equivalent industry accepted reference point sits well below that. Once these types of defaults are set, they take years to move, even when the case for change is good. Recent CommBank and Deutsche Bank surveys suggest Australian hedge ratios are now creeping higher as funds reassess the historical Australian dollar equity correlations post-COVID. This means the direction of travel is closing the gap, slowly. None of this is to say our Australian counterparts are wrong, or that New Zealand should converge to Australian practice. It is to say that the right hedge ratio depends on the structural specifics of where you sit, the depth and concentration of your home market, the FX liability profile of your real economy, the behaviour of your currency in tail events and that for a New Zealand investor those specifics still point to a meaningful, but not dominant, level of foreign currency exposure. So how much, then? For a New Zealand investor, neither extreme is obviously right. Zero hedging exposes you to the full force of NZ dollar appreciation in calm periods. Hedging your portfolio 100% to New Zealand dollars strips out the downside cushion just when you most need it, locks in volatility in the wrong direction, and now that the interest rate “carry” has gone, no longer compensates you for the privilege. For portfolios with a particularly low tolerance for negative returns, like charities and endowments needing to fund regular spending needs, retirees in pension phase, or anyone for whom a 20% capital loss is a behavioural or operational problem rather than a market-cycle annoyance, there is a strong case can be made for running with a very low hedge ratio, or even none at all. The unhedged NZ dollar investor has historically suffered shallower drawdowns in the worst quarters, and for an investor who genuinely cannot ride out the bottom, that protection is worth more than the smoother returns a hedged portfolio delivers in calmer years. It is not the default, but it is a coherent answer for the right kind of portfolio. There are also investors with large swathes of assets exposed to the NZ economy who might benefit from more foreign currency exposure. All of this is to say that the industry convention of hedging to a level of global shares exposure, is perhaps less important than targeting a specific amount of foreign currency exposure at a portfolio level. Our view Currency is volatile, currency is hard to forecast, and currency is genuinely risky if it is the only thing you own. But foreign currency exposure inside a diversified portfolio is something different. It is the closest thing a New Zealand investor has to a free downside hedge, even allowing for the erosion of the carry that historically rewarded New Zealanders for hedging back to a higher-rate currency. The data through the three biggest episodes of equity weakness of the past two decades — the GFC, COVID, and the March 2026 sell-off — supports the conclusion that unhedged offshore exposure has reliably softened the blow when global markets have fallen hardest, while also delivering lower long-run volatility. The irony is that, despite foreign currency being a superpower for a New Zealand investor, it is one often used sparingly. Why? Perhaps memories of the carry from years gone by anchor us to higher hedging than the current environment justifies. Or perhaps it is the convention of setting hedge ratios at a global-shares-sector level rather than a portfolio level. Take the average KiwiSaver Conservative Fund, with around 12% in global shares, versus the average Growth Fund at 52%. Does it really make sense for both to hedge 50% of those global equities? The Conservative investor still has USD liabilities but a very limited appetite for drawdowns, and we believe little or even zero hedging may be better aligned to their objectives than the industry-standard 50%. Putting tactical considerations aside, a healthy degree of foreign currency exposure in a New Zealand denominated portfolio rests on structural diversification of currency risk. Unhedged exposures provide offsets to a fundamentally USD-denominated cost of living. The empirical evidence indicates it also provided downside protection through three of the worst equity drawdowns of the past quarter-century, while delivering lower volatility. The principle is the same one we started with, being that currency exposure when used carefully provides a key diversification benefit within New Zealander’s portfolios, not a bug. Previous Next

< Back Media round up - October 2026 Anthony Edmonds 1 Oct 2026 A quick round-up of some recent news stories featuring Aurellan. Here is a quick round-up of some recent news stories featuring Aurellan: Chris Di Leva, Business Desk, KiwiSaver growth asset exposure https://businessdesk.co.nz/article/kiwisaver/aurellan-ponders-kiwisavers-growth-assets-exposure Anthony Edmonds, Investment News and Goodreturns, SPIVA NZ Scorecard https://www.goodreturns.co.nz/article/call-for-fma-to-investigate-spiva-scorecard https://investmentnews.co.nz/investment-news/down-the-index-launderette-new-study-questions-spiva-spin/ https://investmentnews.co.nz/investment-news/spiva-nz-debate-heats-up-as-half-year-report-lands/ Chris Di Leva, Investment News, Aurellan launches Private Markets Yield Fund https://investmentnews.co.nz/investment-news/aurellan-targets-private-payback-with-offbeat-wholesale-fund/ Previous Next

< Back KiwiSaver investors are taking on more risk, what it could mean for the next crisis Chris Di Leva 6 Oct 2026 55% of investors now in Growth and Aggressive Funds. Would the downside scenarios come as a surprise? KiwiSaver investors are taking on more risk. What it could mean for the next crisis. 2008, 2000, 1997 and 1987 are all periods that are etched in investors' memories. Starting out working in markets not long after the 2008 downturn, I walked into a market where US equities were maligned, investing in bonds was in vogue, and cash was king. The numbers later in this article will show you why. How things have changed. While I don’t doubt many of the changes we've seen in KiwiSaver over the past decade have been the right thing, such as changing the default option from conservative funds to balanced ones, some trends are converging which I think are worth paying close attention to. But before we dig into this, let’s take a quick lesson from a scene in the Paddington Bear movie that my kids absolutely love. Mr Brown, a risk analyst no less, is on the phone urgently racing to lock in insurance cover for having a bear in the house, before Paddington floods the bathroom upstairs. It gets a laugh every time in our house (almost as much as the haircut scene in Paddington 2). It is also a pretty good description of how most investors approach risk and diversification. Nobody thinks about it while the bath is filling up, but everybody wants it once the water starts coming through the ceiling. I do worry, however, that when it comes to risk, KiwiSaver members may not appreciate just how full the bath has become. We are taking on more risk Over the past ten years, KiwiSaver investors have taken more risk in their portfolios. A decade ago, growth and aggressive funds, as defined in the Morningstar KiwiSaver Survey, held a combined 29.6% of total KiwiSaver investors’ funds under management. Today that number is close to double, at 54.9%. But the increase in risk does not stop there. The second shift is inside each type of diversified fund peer group, and it gets less attention. KiwiSaver balanced funds in 2016 on average held 53.2% in growth assets like global and New Zealand equities, while today they hold 58%. Diversified growth funds have gone from 70.2% to 74%, and aggressive funds have gone from 85.1% to 95%. While the labels have stayed the same, the portfolios behind them have been drifting more towards growth assets. Some of this is deliberate and defensible. The default change in 2021 did real work, moving default investors from conservative to balanced. Some of it is simply the arithmetic of a bull market. Over the ten years to June 2026 the aggressive category returned 10.3% per annum against 4.1% for the conservative category, so the growth in money has compounded into a larger proportion of the total pool of assets regardless of whether a single member switches. Risk has been rewarded, and reward has bred more risk. Below we look at the proportion of KiwiSaver in each fund type, then we look at the amount of growth assets within each fund type. Source: Morningstar KiwiSaver Survey, June 2016; Morningstar KiwiSaver 360, June 2026. Shares are of multisector funds only. Default options sit within Conservative in 2016 and within Balanced in 2026. Most of our risk is in the global equity market Here is the part that interests me more. It isn't just that we hold more growth assets, it is that the growth assets we hold have become less diversified than they were in the past. Across the whole KiwiSaver system, growth assets rose from 45% to 64% over the decade, a 19 percentage point increase in absolute terms. International shares rose from 25.7% to 45.4%, an almost 20 percentage point increase. In other words, every single percentage point of added risk went into one asset class, being global shares. Everything that might have diversified that exposure went backwards. Exposure to listed local and global property fell from 4.3% to 1.9%. The "other" line, where alternatives like private equity would show up, fell from 1.3% to 0.4%. Only NZ unlisted property rose, NZ 0.5% to 0.9%, and yet that is still a rounding error. Global equities now make up three-quarters of KiwiSaver's total equity exposure, up from two-thirds. A single asset class now accounts for 45 cents of every dollar of New Zealand's retirement savings. Source: Morningstar estimated KiwiSaver market asset allocation, June 2016 and June 2026. Now compare that with Australia. Australian super has also gone global as the savings pool scaled; it used that scale to buy diversification by investing in asset classes such as unlisted infrastructure, unlisted property, private equity, and private credit. Whereas KiwiSaver has scaled from $33 billion to $148 billion and bought more global equities as a portion of the total savings pool. As can be seen below, Australian Superannuation Funds hold almost 15 percentage points more in Private Assets and Alternatives than KiwiSaver Funds. Their default product goes further still. In Australia, MySuper holds 11% in infrastructure, 6% in unlisted private equity and 5% in unlisted property, which puts more than a fifth of Australia's default retirement savings in unlisted and alternative assets. Sources: Morningstar KiwiSaver 360, June 2026; ASFA Super Stats (September 2026), citing APRA quarterly superannuation statistics for the June 2026 quarter. Domestic Shares for NZ include NZ and Australian. Infrastructure in the APRA survey is assumed to be unlisted. The gap is not a rounding difference, and it is not explained by Australia being a more growth-oriented system. This is reflected by the fact that their total listed equity weighting is lower than ours. But you don’t necessarily have to cross the Tasman to find the contrast. The NZ Superannuation Fund holds around a quarter of its portfolio in a range of private markets and alternatives investments, ranging from timberlands, liquid alternatives, private equity, venture capital, carbon credits, real estate and infrastructure. At the Government Superannuation Fund, managed by Annuitas, their target portfolio has almost 23% allocated to global private equity, NZ private equity, catastrophe risk and life settlements. Certainly, in our own work at Aurellan with wholesale and institutional investors, we have been adding return streams that are less correlated with global equities to make portfolios more resilient. How would each fund fare in previous downturns? This brings us to the risk. KiwiSaver funds have become more reliant on global shares just as the global share market itself has become more concentrated. The diversification we thought we were buying has been quietly withdrawn from under us. The numbers over the same decade are remarkable. The top 10 holdings of the MSCI World accounted for around 8% of the index ten years ago. Today that number is around 25%, with the US weight around 70%. Robeco frames this well, highlighting that the effective number of stocks driving the majority of the performance of the MSCI World Index has fallen from more than 300 in 2005 to 84 in October 2025. The market may contain thousands of listed companies, but owning the index has increasingly resembled owning just a few. So, a member in a KiwiSaver growth fund today holds more equity, more of it offshore, and that offshore equity exposure is itself the most concentrated it has been in fifty years. Three trends are compounding in the same direction. The question worth asking is not whether this has worked. It plainly has. The question is what it does to the downside. A useful exercise we do with our clients is to provide portfolio stress tests (on the upside and downside) on a forward and backward-looking basis to help determine actual risk tolerance. Some examples of backward-looking downside stress tests are shown below as well as explanations of each scenario. These are not doomsday predictions; they are actual index returns applied to current KiwiSaver asset allocations. It shows that, for example, using today’s asset allocations of the average aggressive fund, returns would have been down by 37% peak to trough in the Global Financial Crisis or down 29% during the tech bubble. Interestingly in both crises, it would have taken the investor over five years to recover their original capital they had heading into each of the crises. The tech bubble sell-off lasted from early 2000 to early 2002. Even with dividends reinvested, an investment in the Nasdaq-100 bottomed on 9 October 2002 at an 83% decline from its March 2000 peak. While the fall in markets took the escalator, unfortunately the recovery took the stairs. With dividends reinvested, the investment first returned to even in February 2015, nearly 15 years after the purchase. And even that didn't last: it slipped back below its starting value repeatedly over the following 16 months before moving above it for good in mid-2016. The investor who bought the market leaders of 2000 waited 15 years just to get their money back. Even then, a broad S&P 500 fund bought at the same time had done a little better. In the Global Financial Crisis the S&P 500 fell 55% from its October 2007 peak to March 2009. Yet a diversified investor was only back to even by March 2012, about four and a half years after the peak. Banks, the market's largest sector going into the crisis, fared far worse. European banks fell 82% on a total return basis, against 59% for the broader European market, and US financials fell 83%. US financials took around a decade to regain their 2007 peak. European banks took around 18 years and only got there after strong gains in 2024 and 2025. Source: Morningstar KiwiSaver 360, June 2026; asset class splits estimated by Aurellan by applying the market-wide asset mix to each peer group's growth-asset share. Some assumptions around index use and hedging percentages have been made as these are not uniform across funds. Returns are gross of fees and tax. The tech bubble case deserves particular attention. It was a drawdown concentrated in exactly the part of the market that has come to dominate the index, and one where NZ equities, listed property and cash did most of the diversifying work. In today’s portfolios, those are the allocations that have shrunk. Conclusion None of this is an argument for going back to conservative default funds. Higher growth allocations for members with thirty years ahead of them are the right call, and the last decade has borne this out. It is an argument about the composition of that risk, not the quantity. We have concentrated an entire nation's retirement savings into a single factor, global listed equity beta, at the precise moment that factor became the most concentrated it has been in living memory. And we have funded that concentration at the expense of diversification. The obvious focus for the industry is to look at how we can provide KiwiSaver investors with greater diversification within the growth parts of their portfolios beyond traditional listed global and local equities. The Australian industry provides us with a great place to start looking at how they have introduced greater diversification into their nation’s long-term saving pool as have some of NZ’s largest long-term investors. For now, the bath is filling and the water isn't on the floor, yet. Returns have been excellent, members are better off, and it feels like there is no crisis to respond to. That is exactly why now is the time to look at it. The funds that handle the next downturn well will be the ones that do the work before the crisis starts. Mr Brown, a risk analyst by trade, would approve. Previous Next

< Back Aurellan Intergenerational Thinking Podcast featuring Chris Di Leva Chris Di Leva, CFA 25 Nov 2025 Aurellan co-founder and CEO Chris Di Leva is interviewed by Anthony Edmonds. Chris and Anthony talk about Chris' path to Aurellan including learnings from his role as Portfolio Manager at Mercer and Head of Global and Multi Asset Investments at Harbour Asset Management. Aurellan co-founder and CEO Chris Di Leva is interviewed by Anthony Edmonds. You can view this on youtube below or listen at your favourite podcasting app. Previous Next

< Back Passive investing with a large dash of active hypocrisy Anthony Edmonds 3 Sept 2026 Why lots of investment managers and market participants drive revenue by dismissing active management while actively encouraging you to do it anyway, for a fee! Jack Bogle had a simple idea. Don't try to pick the needle. Buy the haystack. His logic was pure arithmetic. All investors collectively own the market. Their collective return, before costs, equals the market return. After costs, the average investor must underperform the market by exactly the fees they pay. Therefore, a reliable way to beat the average investor is to pay less. In 1976, Bogle launched the first index fund for ordinary investors, being what is now the Vanguard 500 Index Fund. The financial industry called it “Bogle’s Folly”. He didn’t mind. In 2026 Vanguard is managing over $12 trillion, and index investing has become the dominant investment approach globally. The industry’s verdict on Bogle’s Folly has been comprehensively reversed. But somewhere between Bogle’s original idea and today, something else happened. Something worth paying attention to. The investment management industry is super smart, as it takes ideas and twists them into new ways to make money. Fund managers and advisers have latched on to promoting Bogle’s thesis with a twist. Creating, promoting, and advising clients to invest in thematic index funds, smart beta, rules based or scientific ETFs has been an incredibly profitable way for the industry to evolve. While believing in active management, we also are pragmatic and offer our client’s access to broad market index funds While recent history has played against active management in some asset classes, particularly equities. At Aurellan, we believe that through a strong manager research process we undertake with our global partner, Wilshire, outperforming active managers can be identified. It is worth noting where we manage diversified portfolios, like we do for our founders’ families’ portfolios, as well as external clients such as foundations, charities and other family offices and trusts, if a client has a strong preference for low-cost tax-efficient broad-based index funds, or the client’s fee budget is best spent elsewhere, then we also have these funds available. “Broad-based index funds” is the key alignment with Bogle’s thesis, as the data shows us that adding value by actively selecting thematic “index” funds, using a modified index is a fool’s errand, so let’s dig more into what we mean. Not all indices are created equal The ETF and index fund wrappers that Bogle helped create turned out to be remarkably versatile. While the passive global share funds we use track broad-based indices like the MSCI All Countries World Index, the same indexing approach and methods can be used to create ETFs focused on a plethora of thematic sectors including healthcare, automation, and robotics to name but a few. The result is a proliferation of over 5,000 ETFs in the US alone. Each one technically tracks an index but many come with a twist such as being thematic index funds, smart beta, rules based or scientific Usually, these twists are just a twist away from passive, towards an index which is very active relative to a broad market index.The possibility of what an index can be are endless, almost literally, according to the Index Industry Association, there are about 3 million indices globally. And yes, you read that right, in other words there’s about 50 times more indices than actual individual listed company stocks globally. Herein lies the problem. A robotics ETF could well be technically considered passive because it tracks an index and does not try to pick which robotics company will outperform. But the decision to buy a robotics ETF instead of following Bogle’s advice of focusing on the total overall market fund is an active decision, is an active bet that robotics companies will outperform the broader market. The fund in some sense is passive. The investor’s decision to pick the fund is not. Bogle himself was clear on this. He warned specifically that ETFs would encourage speculation and that thematic products were not what he had in mind. His instruction was unambiguous: own the entire market, at the lowest possible cost. Not “the automation part of the market.” Not “the clean energy part of the market at a higher fee.” The whole market at the lowest possible fee. The New Zealand version of the problem New Zealand investors are well served by two platforms that have done more than anyone to bring genuine index investing to ordinary Kiwis: Kernel and Smart. Many of their core products are exactly what Bogle was talking about. Smart’s NZX 50, US 500, and international equity products. Kernel’s S&P 500 is another example of this. Broad. Low cost. Genuine passive index funds. Both platforms then offer something else. Smart has its Automation and Robotics ETF (BOT), Healthcare Innovation ETF (LIV), Bitcoin ETF (BTC), and Gold ETF. Kernel has its S&P Global Clean Energy Fund, Global Dividend Aristocrats and Global 100 (focused on the largest global companies). Neither platform is doing anything wrong by offering these products. They exist because investors want them. But here’s the thing. An investor holding NZ 20, Global 100, Clean Energy, Automation and Robotics, and Healthcare Innovation has made five distinct active allocation decisions and is making investments in funds not tracking broad market indices. Their returns will differ considerably to a portfolio comprised of more recognised benchmarks like the S&P/NZX 50 and MSCI All Country World Index. In other words, the result an investor can get, despite investing in “index” funds, can be more active than funds managed by active managers. We don’t think these products are what Bogle originally envisaged when he said to “buy the haystack”. The performance record nobody is talking about Kernel's S&P Global Clean Energy Fund is instructive. While for the one year ending 31 July 2026 its return might be over 50%, importantly its five-year return is only roughly 4% per annum. Over the same period, an unhedged S&P 500 index fund returned roughly 16% per annum. The investor who bought the clean energy "theme" underperformed by almost 12% per annum and took considerably more volatility to do it. In cumulative terms a difference of nearly 90 percentage points. Hardly a passive outcome. This is not unusual. Morningstar's work on thematic funds found that over five years the funds themselves returned 7.3% per annum, while the investors in them earned just 2.4%, a gap of nearly five percentage points a year, driven almost entirely by timing. Investors bought when the story was exciting, which is to say when the holdings were expensive, and sold when the story faded, which is to say after the holdings had fallen. What would Bogle say? We think Bogle would look at New Zealand’s core ETF offerings and see products he spent his life arguing for. Kernel’s S&P 500 fund. Smart’s NZX 50 product. Vanguard’s Total World Fund at 0.06% per year, giving a Kiwi investor ownership of virtually every listed company on earth for almost nothing. He would look at the thematic range of “index funds” that have been created and note with characteristic restraint, that the financial industry had found yet again a way to dress up a very old product in very new clothes. He would observe that passive investing in an active theme is an oxymoron. He would point out that the fees are higher, the evidence for outperformance is absent, and the behavioural pattern has not changed in fifty years. Bogle’s original instruction was not complicated. Don’t look for the needle in the haystack. Buy the haystack. The whole haystack, and at the lowest possible cost. The passive revolution succeeded. However, the industry’s response was to quietly build a new form of active management through the creation of active index funds, while charging investors a premium fee for these. The emperor’s new portfolio is impeccably constructed. It is also, on close inspection, doing exactly what the emperor claimed he had given up. Previous Next

WHOLESALE INVESTORS ONLY Aurellan Private Markets Yield Fund Global private markets income with quarterly distributions Most New Zealand investors have two building blocks available to create their portfolios: shares and bonds. The Aurellan Private Markets Yield Fund was built to close the gap. Working with Wilshire, we have brought together a portfolio of private markets investments chosen for one shared characteristic, being that they are backed by real assets or contracted cashflows, and they pay income. The Fund invests into an established global portfolio private markets investments spread across a range of global managers, so capital is deployed from day one rather than drawn down over three to five years. Target characteristics 10 to 14% Target total return per annum after all fees and costs, measured over rolling five-year periods. Not guaranteed. 8% Target annual distribution. Paid quarterly. A target only and not guaranteed. Low Correlation to equities. Returns driven by leases, royalties, contracts and asset-backed loans, rather than the performance of listed markets. Focused where capital & expertise are scarce Aurellan believes basic supply and demand mean some of the best opportunities are found where capital and expertise are scarce. The Fund, through its investment in the underlying Wilshire Alternative Yield Solutions (WAYS) Fund, targets overlooked areas of global markets, which are typically too small for large institutions, too specialist for generalists, or too hard to classify as traditional equities or bonds. The common theme across the portfolio is cashflow. Across leasing, royalties and loans, the Fund seeks to provide exposure to investments backed by recurring income, contractual payments, real assets, or established revenue streams, and in doing so targets assets with attractive yields, regular distributions, and diversification relative to listed shares and bonds. As the Fund’s underlying portfolio manager, Wilshire evaluates a wide range of opportunities for the Fund. While the Fund initially gains exposure though the underlying WAYS Fund, in the future it may also invest in other underlying funds and co-investment opportunities. Unlike a fund that focuses on a single area and invests there regardless, Wilshire’s team weighs the forward-looking prospects of each potential investment and determines how its risks correlate with the Underlying Fund’s other holdings before deciding whether to invest. Examples of investment opportunities within the Fund's opportunity set are shown below. Note this is not exhaustive. Intangible Assets Intellectual Property & Patent Rights Music, entertainment & content royalties Healthcare royalties Brand & technology licensing Risk Transfer Life-contingent annuities Structured settlements Litigation finance Natural-catastrophe reinsurance Specialised Asset-Based Finance Water & mineral rights Railcar & container leasing Infrastructure Transportation: aircraft, helicopters, railcars, barges Niche Credit Accounts receivable Tax credits and specialty contracts Non-sponsored company lending NAV loans and consumer receivables How to invest We are pleased that investors have multiple choices to access our funds: Direct $100k minimum Direct reporting & contact Seed investor deal at Aurellan's discretion OCIO Clients Wholesale only service Aurellan builds your portfolio Utilises this fund and others which are highly rated by us and Wilshire Aurellan Funds are also available via selected financial advisor platforms. Ask your advisor for more information. Not sure? Email contact@aurellan.com

Explore our services and get in touch Our Services 01. Custom Website Design This service offers tailored website designs to enhance brand identity and user engagement. It includes personalized layout creation, responsive design, and branding integration. Ideal for businesses seeking a unique online presence that attract and retain visitors. Customers can request a portfolio showcase and branding consultation as part of the package. Show more 02. SEO Optimization Package Enhance your website's visibility in search engine results through targeted keyword integration and on-page SEO strategies. This service improves organic traffic and helps attract potential clients. It includes keyword research, content suggestions, and technical SEO tuning. Perfect for increasing online discoverability. Show more 03. Social Media Content Planning Develop a strategic content plan tailored to your brand to increase engagement on social media platforms. This service includes content calendars, post templates, and hashtag strategies to grow your online community. Designed to generate leads and improve brand awareness over time. Show more

Our Services The Aurellan team are deeply experienced in working with family trusts, iwi, land trusts, charitable trusts, superannuation schemes and other wholesale clients. Our approach is highly tailored to each investor with attention paid to ensuring investors utilise structures which are tax effective. Aurellan offers the following services to wholesale clients, as well as Managed Funds for retail clients: Implemented Consulting Aurellan’s implemented consulting (OCIO) service goes beyond traditional investment consulting by not just advising but taking accountability for outcomes. Instead of leaving execution to trustees or committees, Aurellan acts with discretion to keep portfolios aligned in real time, reducing governance burden and fiduciary risk. Clients benefit from global research through our Wilshire partnership, combined with independent New Zealand ownership and meaningful co-investment from our founders, ensuring strong alignment. Portfolios are tailored to each client’s purpose — whether income for charities, intergenerational wealth for iwi, or capital preservation for family offices — and are executed with transparency, speed, and professional oversight. Portfolio Management Aurellan’s portfolio management solutions are built to deliver enduring outcomes through disciplined investment design and execution. We construct and actively manage diversified portfolios tailored to each client’s objectives, balancing growth, income, and risk management in line with their purpose. Drawing on Wilshire’s global manager research and Aurellan’s deep local experience, we access world-class opportunities while maintaining independence and transparency. Our founders’ significant co-investment ensures strong alignment, while our focus on responsible investment and clear reporting gives clients confidence that every decision supports their long-term mission. Managed Funds Aurellan offers managed fund solutions to clients through both regulated managed investment funds and wholesale funds. These PIE funds are accessible to investors via custodial platforms, investment adviser, or directly through us. The Aurellan Global Shares Fund is available to investors as both hedged and unhedged funds, which are registered regulated managed funds. The Aurellan Private Markets Yield Fund is focused on providing investors with an exposure to a global portfolio of cash-rich investments like royalties, leases, and specialist loan funds. The Fund is only available to wholesale investors. All of Aurellan's Funds are PIEs, reflecting the tax benefits that these provide to New Zealand tax-payers. They are all zero-rated PIE funds meaning that they can be used by offshore investors and transitional tax-residents. If you are interested in learning more about Aurellan's Funds, or any future funds we release, please subscribe to our research below: Subscribe

Aurellan Global Shares Fund Expert managers. Independently selected. The global share market is a big place, comprised of thousands of stocks across dozens of developed and emerging markets. It is a sector where many try to beat the benchmark and fail. One of the uniting beliefs in founding Aurellan, was to identify a way that New Zealand investors can get access to the world's best managers to give them the best possible chance of success. To help us identify who we believe are the best managers, we engaged Wilshire after searching the world for a global partner with a long and successful track record of identifying investment managers at an early stage. You can find more detail on how they do this in the below video where we talk to Wilshire's Head of Manager Research, Rob Noe, who helped us build the Fund. Once we identified the managers, none of whom were accessible via other NZ registered funds, we appointed them to run bespoke mandates for Aurellan clients. Then, we decided to do something we have never seen in New Zealand before and disclose Aurellan's portion of the total annual fund charge. For investors this means: Aurellan is incentivised to pick who we, and Wilshire, believe are the best global managers and change these managers if they are not performing as expected, or if there is a change in their team or structure, we are not comfortable with. Investors receive the scale benefits as the fund grows and if we appoint a manager with lower fees, then the investors get the benefit, not Aurellan. Key fund facts Manager-of-managers approach: Aurellan selects external leading specialist global investment managers for selecting shares. NZ-domiciled PIE compliant funds: Aurellan’s funds are structured as Portfolio Investment Entities (PIEs) for New Zealand tax efficiency. Available as hedged or unhedged funds: Allowing you to choose your own currency hedging ratio. Partnership with Wilshire: Leverages the global research and scale of US-based Wilshire, who are experts in researching investment managers and constructing portfolios for clients. Access to leading global specialists: The current managers of the Aurellan’s Funds are Loomis Sayles (growth), Los Angeles Capital (core quantitative), and Causeway Capital (value). Underlying managers The Aurellan Global Shares Fund currently has three underlying managers, all of who run segregated portfolios on our investors' behalf. We select managers with different styles with the aim of providing investors with a smoother investing journey. Currently we have a growth style manager, a value style manager and a core/quantitative manager. Our current managers are shown below, please note they can change from time to time. Why we like them Owned by staff Firm focussed on equities only Great track record In other Wilshire Funds Good "all weather" strategy Unique approach based off "Investor Preference Theory" www.lacapm.com Why we like them Employee owned Diverse team, unified philosophy Value focus is firmwide Deep fundamental research True to label value investor Strong track record In other Wilshire Funds www.causewaycap.com Why we like them Long term stable owner Patient growth investors Low turnover Longevity - founded 1926 Impressive track record Well-resourced global team ww.loomissayles.com How to invest We are pleased to offer investors multiple choices to access our funds: InvestNow $250 minimum Easy digital onboarding Pay the fees stated on our PDS Direct $500k minimum Direct reporting & contact Possible rebates for size OCIO Clients Wholesale only service Aurellan builds your portfolio Utilises this fund and others which are highly rated by us and Wilshire Aurellan Funds are also available via selected financial advisor platforms. Ask your advisor for more information. Not sure? Email contact@aurellan.com Documentation The Aurellan Global Shares Fund and Aurellan Hedged Global Shares Fund is issued and managed by FundRock NZ Limited. The links to the disclosure material for these funds can be found below. Product Disclosure Statement Statement of Investment Policies and Objectives Fund Fact Sheet

Our Team Chris Di Leva CFA Chris is the CEO and CIO of Aurellan Asset Management. Full Profile Anthony Edmonds Anthony is the Director, Business Development and Clients at Aurellan Asset Management. Full Profile Rachel Weld Rachel is an Investment Principal at Aurellan Asset Management. Full Profile Our Board This is your Team section. It's a great place to introduce your team and talk about what makes it special, such as your culture or work philosophy. Don't be afraid to illustrate personality and character to help users connect with your team. Independent Chairman Owen Gibson View Profile Director Campbell Gower View Profile Director Anthony Edmonds View Profile Managing Director Chris Di Leva CFA View Profile Investment Committee This is your Team section. Briefly introduce the team then add their bios below. Click here to edit. Our investment committee exists to ensure that our clients receive the best possible outcomes. The committee includes staff of Aurellan, and Wilshire. One of the key benefits of partnering with Aurellan is is our highly tailored investment approach which has a high level of independent oversight, insight from Wilshire and internal challenge. Being focused purely on investment management frees us up to review every client portfolio. You can partner with us without the fear that your portfolio will get lost or forgotten amongst thousands of others. CEO and CIO Chris Di Leva, CFA View Profile Senior Vice President, Wilshire David Johnson, CFA View Profile Investment Principal and Chair of Investment Committee Rachel Weld View Profile Director, Business Development and Clients Anthony Edmonds View Profile

About Us Aurellan Asset Management is an independent New Zealand-owned investment company which provides tailored investment management services to wholesale and institutional investors as well as managed fund solutions. The word Aurellan captures the spirit, goals and vision of our founders. Aurum for gold, auvum for the longevity of our time horizon and elan for the energy we aim to bring to every client interaction. Aurellan exists to serve our clients with dedication and clarity. We bring energy and care to every relationship, ensuring that our solutions are tailored to the unique objectives and responsibilities of each investor we work with. Our Advantage Built on experience Our team has a track record in managing billions of dollars for some of the largest institutions and families in New Zealand. Aurellan has a partnership with Wilshire Advisors LLC "Wilshire" within the New Zealand market. Wilshire was founded in 1972 in Santa Monica, CA with around 300 staff globally and offices in the USA, UK, Singapore, the Netherlands, Hong Kong and China. Independent decisions We are not affiliated with any investment banks, brokers nor do we employ our own investment teams, allowing us to build portfolios which utilise specialist managers and strategies which Aurellan and Wilshire believe are truly the best fit and most appropriate. Aligned with you Our owners are employees and investors in our portfolios aligning us with our investors and enabling our proposition to be uniquely independent, impartial, unencumbered by conflicts and truly long term. In each Aurellan Fund we disclose the total amount invested by staff and shareholders, assuring you of our commitment and belief in our funds. Our partnership with Wilshire In establishing Aurellan we searched the world for a partner with global expertise which spanned across public and private markets. We selected Wilshire because they truly understand the meaning of a partnership. Their average client tenure is 17 years, with many client relationships spanning decades. They are called upon for advice by some of the world's largest institutional investors and family offices. What the partnership means for our clients is that when we are building your portfolio, we do so by utilising Wilshire's global research and utilising their technology to build your portfolio. Aurellan is your gateway to their scale, which spans across offices from the USA, through Europe, and across Asia. It means that your investment universe is not limited to the strategies which we can research here in New Zealand. Wilshire scours the globe to identify managers with a process which starts from screening the tens of thousands of managers on their global database. “Wilshire has a broad global reach, deep investment knowledge and long experience in building portfolio solutions for clients across the world. But we recognise the importance of working with experienced people like the team at Aurellan who have on-the-ground understanding of their local markets.”” Leah Emkin, Wilshire Chief Client Officer Global expertise with local knowledge We built Aurellan based on our strong belief that portfolio management in New Zealand can be done better. New Zealand's unique tax system means that many strategies and solutions like Australian Unit Trusts, Listed Investment Trusts and Exchange Traded Funds (to name a few) which work well globally, are not optimal vehicles for many New Zealand investors. That is one of many examples we can cite that prove it is a blend of global expertise and domestic knowledge that is optimal when constructing portfolios for clients. "The PIE Fund is one of the greatest gifts that New Zealand investors have been given. But shockingly it is a gift that many investors, including many family trusts, are not utilising as much as they can or should" Aurellan co-founder Anthony Edmonds, who established NZ's largest fund hosting company and in the process facilitated the transfer of billions of dollars to more tax efficient structures.