Sometimes your Spaceship Voyager portfolio will act differently to the rest of the market. You might expect it to behave in the same way as a particular stock exchange or industry. But here’s what to keep in mind instead.
As an investor, you have choices about where you put your money.
Two common investment options are buying shares in a company, or buying units in a managed fund or ETF. Spaceship offers three managed funds, which we call our Spaceship Voyager portfolios.
When you buy a share in a company, you own a piece of that company directly. When you buy a unit in a Spaceship Voyager portfolio, we pool your money with other investors’ money and invest and manage it on your behalf. You get what’s called a ‘proportionate beneficial interest’ in the companies we invest in, which means that while we hold the investments in our name, you can still benefit from them. So you don’t own shares of the companies directly.
Units have prices that can go up and down just like shares do.
The Spaceship Voyager portfolio unit prices will move up or down depending on the performance of everything that each particular portfolio has invested in.
Each unit price gets updated each Australian business day (except for Australian and NSW public holidays), around midday, after all the calculations are complete.
Checking the unit price can be an emotional experience, especially if the Spaceship Voyager portfolio you own is behaving differently to what you might expect.
If you check on other market indices, such as the ASX 200 or the NASDAQ, you might be expecting similar performance.
Here’s what to keep in mind instead.
There are several factors to keep in mind when comparing our unit price to the overall market performance including but not limited to:
Adverse currency movements:
Because Spaceship invests in international shares but quotes your portfolio in Australian dollars, if the Australian dollar goes up, it can decrease portfolio returns, as the translated value of overseas stock also decreases. Having said that, the opposite will also apply.
Different underlying investments:
The stock market comprises hundreds of exchanges across the world including the ASX, FTSE 100 and NASDAQ, and is underpinned by thousands of companies across various industries.
Because the makeup of each exchange is different, the daily return of each exchange would also be different. Sometimes it will be more, sometimes it will be less, and sometimes it will go in the opposite direction.
The same principle also applies to all of the Spaceship Voyager investments, as they have a mix of Australian stocks and global stocks across various industries.
For instance, our Where the World is Going methodology sees us investing in areas such as tech, consumer, and health, rather than in banks and resources.
So, while there can be some market correlation, when you compare your portfolio to the ASX or any other benchmark, sometimes we will outperform the market, and sometimes the market will outperform us, but it would be very rare to see the exact same performance between us and the market because we don’t hold the same stocks at the same weighting.
Where the World is Going
Finally, our Where the World is Going methodology sees us investing in just that — where the world is going — and not necessarily what is happening right now.
We believe in the value of long-term investing.
Of course, our investment team monitors the underlying issues that cause share prices to go up and down and will act if they believe an event will have long-term impacts on consumer behaviour.
For example, when COVID-19 appeared, we sold our travel stocks in the Spaceship Universe Portfolio because we believed people would be less willing to travel, borders would be shut, and it would take years for travel to reopen. But, again, we only act when we believe an event will have long-term impacts.
We have a minimum suggested timeframe of seven years for anyone holding an investment in a Spaceship Voyager portfolio because, generally, while stock investments can go up and down, they generally go up over the long term. (Although, naturally, past performance is not a reliable indicator of future performance.)
