Great news! The investment portfolios that follow Regulation 28 rules have done very well over the past three years, giving members strong positive returns.

The Big Idea: Aggressive Portfolios

• An aggressive portfolio is an investment strategy that prioritises maximising growth over keeping money perfectly safe.
• Higher Risk, Higher Potential Reward: Think of it like driving a sports car. It can go much faster (more growth), but it also means the ride is bumpier and there's a greater chance of big ups and downs (higher risk/volatility).
• Why it works for younger savers and savers with more than 7 years to go before retirement: When you have many years until retirement, you can afford to take on more risk. If the market drops, you have plenty of time for your investments to recover and grow before you actually need the money. Time is your greatest asset.
• The Main Ingredient (Growth Assets): Aggressive portfolios hold a very large portion of "growth assets," which are investments that have the potential for high returns but can also lose value in the short term. The most common growth asset is equities (stocks/shares).

Aggressive portfolios aim to beat inflation by 5%. Currently inflation is about 3.5% (moves up and down) so we would want to see the aggressive portfolios give returns of 8.5% per year.

As a reminder, inflation is what happens when the prices of almost everything, like bread, petrol, and electricity, keep going up.

The aggressive portfolios have given members returns of over 17% per year for the last 3 years! That’s 8.5% more per year than we were expecting!

Important Information, Remember: Investment performance goes up and down over time – that’s normal. And because we have had such good returns over the last few years we can expect that there will be some weaker performance coming in the future. We don’t know when but we know it is coming. Could be tomorrow but it could be next year or maybe even the year after that!

For the longer-term inflation has mostly been around 5%per year and the investment returns for aggressive portfolios has been about 10% per year.

Remember stay focused: Past performance doesn’t guarantee future results. The best approach is to stay invested and think long term.