This has now developed into a sustained and robust market recovery and in the light of improving economic data, we expect this growth recovery to continue well into next year and beyond. The current corporate reporting season will set the markets course for the next 6 months.

We are quite confident in our view that our clients have survived this global financial crisis and we have been fine-tuning portfolios for recovery. At this time the Australian market continues to move into positive territory.

How have we performed?

There has been much media hype about the poor average super fund performance and investment returns for the year ended 30 June 2009. Although our client portfolios are all individually tailored, we have randomly surveyed 60 of our client self managed super funds to obtain an average earning rate for comparison purposes.

Industry                      2008 09 Balanced Fund returns

Note Hewison returns are net of management, administration and advisory fees, industry returns are not

As you can see, our clients outperformed the market average by a considerable margin. But an important factor is the income return, this has remained consistent throughout the 5 year survey period at 7.0 – 7.9% per annum.

We are very pleased that we have managed to achieve these returns through such a difficult time which have once again proven the effectiveness of our investment philosophies in such an emphatic way. As we always remind ourselves:

Anyone can perform when the markets are positive – the real test comes when things turn sour.