Investment options

Investments to suit your needs and stage of life

As a member, you have a choice when it comes to how your retirement savings are invested. You can choose from diversified and single asset class investment options that let you mix and match how your super is invested. If you don’t make a choice, you’ll be automatically invested in our Lifecycle Investment Strategy. You can also choose to invest in this strategy at any time.

Lifecycle Investment Strategy

The strategy works by investing your retirement savings in a mix of the High Growth and Conservative Balanced investment options based on your age. The philosophy of the strategy is simple: to give you significant exposure to growth assets such as shares (the High Growth investment option) in the early stages of your working life, and then gradually reduce this as you get older by increasing your exposure to defensive assets such as bonds and cash (the Conservative Balanced investment option). This helps provide less volatile investment returns as you get older.

Read more in our Lifecycle Investment Strategy factsheet or watch the video below for a quick overview of how the strategy works.

Six diversified investment options

Diversified across asset classes to match different investor risk profiles

Six single asset class investment options

Allow you to determine your own asset allocation.

Where do we invest your super?

We appoint professional investment managers to invest your super. We regularly review their investment performance, risk management and investment process. We can and do remove managers and add new ones. View the latest investment managers list (PDF).

Term Deposits

The Term Deposit investment option invests in the fixed term deposit products of Australian Authorised Deposit-taking Institutions (ADIs) chosen by Mine Super, such as banks, building societies and credit unions.

We recommend you read our Product Disclosure Statement and seek financial advice before investing in the Term Deposit investment option.

Latest Term Deposit interest rate

Note: We've chosen these term deposits from a panel of authorised deposit-taking institutions, which are reviewed weekly. The interest rates nominated below don't take into account any fees and taxes that may be deducted on maturity.

Investment term	Issuer	Interest rate For applications received by 5pm on Thursday, 27 January 2022
Six months	ME Bank	0.50% per annum
One year	ME Bank	0.60% per annum

About your Term Deposit investment

Valid applications received by us by 5pm on a Thursday when rates have been published for that week will be invested that week. If you don't make this cut off you'll be invested the next week we have a Term Deposit available.

See our Product Disclosure Statement and Term Deposit factsheet for more information.

Invest in the Term Deposit investment option

You can invest in the Term Deposit option at any time by completing the Invest in a Term deposit option form and returning to us.

Standard Risk Measure (SRM)

The SRM allows you to compare investment options by considering the expected number of negative annual returns over any 20 year period.

The SRM isn’t a complete assessment of all forms of investment risk. For example, it doesn’t detail what size a negative return could be, nor the potential for a positive return to be less than your objective. Further, it doesn’t consider the impact of administration fees and tax on the likelihood of a negative return.

How does the SRM show risk?

The SRM places this risk into one of seven risk labels, ranging from very low to very high. If the risk is ‘low’, we’d expect one or less years of negative returns over 20 years. If the risk is ‘high’ we’d expect between four and six years of negative returns over any 20 year period, as shown in the diagram below.

These negative returns can be experienced several years apart or several years in a row within a 20 year period.

How is the risk for each option worked out?

We develop a set of capital market assumptions (return, volatility, correlation, etc) for the asset classes which make up the investments of our investment options.

Using the portfolio weights and these assumptions, we apply portfolio simulation techniques to determine the probability of a negative return occurring over a one-year period.

This probability is then multiplied by 20 to give an estimate of how many years in 20 we expect an investment option to deliver a negative return. This then feeds into our risk assessment which calculates the expected risk bands / labels for each of our investment options.

What kind of information do we consider?

We consider how returns and volatility are affected by different economic conditions, such as inflation, economic growth and asset prices.

Investment costs

Consistent with regulatory guidelines, we don’t consider the impact of administration fees or tax and we only take into account investment management fees.

What else should I consider when thinking about the risks of my super investments?

The real world is complex and not always rational. This means mathematical theories may not always play out in practice. So, while the SRM can help you understand your investment risk, it shouldn’t be the only consideration.

For example, the SRM doesn’t show you:

how big a negative return will be;
whether you’ll get the returns you’re after; and
how fees and taxes will impact your return.