If your super has fallen, what should you do?
Ed Tomlinson
5 April 2022
Your super balance changes every day, fluctuating with the value of investment markets as investors buy and sell: it’s the normal way markets function.
Today we’re more aware of these changing values now we can log in to our superannuation accounts and see the balance daily. And it can be concerning to see that balance fluctuate by sometimes considerable amounts.
From January 5, the Australian sharemarket began to pullback: 21 days later shares fell to their lowest value in seven months. It represented investor reaction to talk of rising interest rates, new COVID variants and the threat of war in Europe. (By early April that lost value was regained).
We’ve been here before. One example is in early 2018 when investors reacted to the threat of rising rates: from a market high in January of that year, Australian shares lost $90 billion in value in early February.
But it took only three weeks for shares to regain that value as the below graph shows.
S&P/ASX 200 index performance (Jan-Feb 2018)
Source: FactSet