Australia somehow figured out how to consistently beat the stock market, which basically goes against everything we know about finance.
SSRN · March 13, 2026 · 6298439
Why it matters
In most countries, active fund managers rarely beat simple index benchmarks, but Australian 'Super Funds' have consistently generated significant excess returns for 20 years. They succeed by using their massive scale to buy unlisted, private assets—like infrastructure and direct property—that are simply unavailable to individual investors or standard index funds.
From the abstract
This paper evaluates the performance of Australia's largest superannuation funds by comparing their default MySuper products to custom public market equivalent (PME) benchmarks. Using two decades of monthly data and returns-based style analysis, we find that most funds generate statistically significant excess returns. This outperformance is robust across Sharpe, Sortino, and Omega ratios, as well as CAPM alphas, and holds under alternative benchmarking approaches. However, since 2021, excess pe