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Not far from Wall Street, near the beating heart of the financial world, is a famous statue. The Charging Bull, or the Bull of Wall Street, symbolises financial prosperity and optimism. It is fierce and energetic, much like the market at times.

If you have made the decision to set up your own self-managed super fund, one of the first issues you will need to consider is whether your SMSF will have a corporate or individual trustee structure. This choice of structure is important since it will affect how your SMSF is administered and managed.

Self-managed super funds (or SMSFs) are an increasingly popular way to save for retirement. According to recent ATO statistics, more than 1 million people are currently members of an SMSF (up 20% since 2012) and nearly $636 billion worth of assets (about 30% of Australia’s entire superannuation pool) now lie in the hands of SMSFs.

Picking next year’s outperforming investment is a bit like throwing darts at a dartboard blindfolded. The chance of you being on target is pretty slim. Chasing investment returns based on historical performance is often a recipe.

We recently enhanced our investment portfolios by adding infrastructure as an asset class (ASX ticker “IFRA”) and replacing the Australian listed property asset class with international listed property (ASX ticker “DJRE”).

Investing can often seem complicated and scary. But what if we told you that there is an easy way to create a low-cost, globally diversified and professionally managed portfolio of investments? The secret: robo-advice.

In 2014, Warren Buffett revealed that his will contains instructions that a majority of Berkshire Hathaway's excess cash be invested in a low-cost index fund.

KEY TAKEAWAYS • Rebalancing is where portions of a portfolio are bought and/or sold in order to restore the weighting of each holding back to its desired target allocation. • Research has shown that rebalancing helps lower portfolio volatility and enhance returns. • Six Park automatically rebalances your portfolio so you don’t have to worry about doing it yourself.

While a very small minority of fund managers do manage to “beat the market” from time to time, such outperformance tends not be sustained for extended periods. It is also nearly impossible to identify in advance which managers will actually outperform the market for a particular period. A recent study by S&P Dow Jones found that less than 5% of the highest performing funds managed to retain their top quartile ranking after three years – and only 0.28% (i.e. 2 out of the 703 top quartile funds!) stayed top quartile performers after 5 years! The data also showed a strong likelihood for the better performing funds to become the worst-performing funds over time – with over 25% of the initial top quartile funds becoming bottom quartile funds by the end of the five year period.