At Independent Wealth Partners, we describe our approach as ‘evidence-led.’ That isn’t a slogan; it’s a discipline. We don’t invest on hunches, forecasts, or the latest hot manager. We follow the weight of evidence about what actually gives clients the best chance of reaching their goals, and for more than two decades that evidence has kept pointing to the same place.
The good news is that the evidence isn’t complicated, and it isn’t gloomy. Once you see it clearly it becomes genuinely liberating, because it tells you exactly how to win: by refusing to play a game almost no one wins.
The scoreboard no one can argue with
Every six months, S&P publishes its SPIVA scorecard, the longest-running and most-cited study of active managers against their benchmarks. The headline is now so consistent it is almost dull. Most active managers underperform, and the longer you watch, the worse it gets.
In Australia, over the 15 years to the end of 2024, 85% of Australian share funds failed to beat the S&P/ASX 200. In global shares, 95% fell short. That alone is a strong case for indexing, but it isn’t the number that convinced us. The number that convinced us sits one layer deeper.
The overlay that changes the picture
SPIVA already does something most performance tables don’t. It adds back the funds that quietly died along the way. Over the past 15 years, 57% of Australian funds were merged or shut down, often removing their poor results from the record. Strip that survivorship bias out, and the comparison is finally honest.
But we wanted a sharper question answered. Forget beating the index once; who beats it consistently, year after year? That, after all, is the promise active management makes. So we overlaid the survivorship-clean data from S&P’s Persistence Scorecard, and the result is striking:
| Actively managed funds (Australia) | Beat their index (1 yr, 2022) | Beat it 3 years running | Top quartile 5 years running |
| Australian shares (vs S&P/ASX 200) | 41% (127 of 307) | 0.8% (one fund) | 0% |
| Global shares (vs S&P World) | 42% (130 of 306) | 3.1% | 0% |
| All fund categories | 40% (354 of 896) | 9.3% | 0.5% |
Of the 307 Australian share funds measured, 127 beat the ASX 200 in 2022. Just one of them beat it again in each of the next two years. One. Stretch the window to five straight years, and not a single Australian equity fund stayed in the top quartile the whole way through.
The smartest people in the world, and they still can’t predict the future
Sit with that for a moment. These aren’t amateurs. They are the most resourced, most credentialled, most highly incentivised investors on earth: teams of analysts, Bloomberg terminals, PhDs, and now AI. Yet over any recent three-year stretch, barely one in three hundred could beat a plain Australian index every single year. Over five years, effectively none.
The lesson isn’t that fund managers are bad at their jobs. It is bigger, and more humbling. The future is genuinely unpredictable. Past performance simply doesn’t predict future performance, and the data shows the winners rotate almost at random. Picking the rare consistent winner in advance is close to impossible, because the one thing you would need to forecast is the one thing that refuses to be forecast.
So we don’t try: set the mandate, get out of the way, no ego
This is where ‘evidence-led’ becomes a way of running money, not just a phrase. If almost no one can consistently beat the market, the smart move isn’t to hunt for the exception. It is to stop trying to be the exception at all, and instead capture the market’s return as cheaply, broadly and reliably as possible. Our whole philosophy comes down to three moves:
- Set the rules. We build a clear, long-term mandate covering asset allocation, risk budget and cost ceiling, developed with global asset consultant WTW, who advise on more than A$4.8 trillion worldwide.
- Get out of the way. We hold that mandate through the noise, rather than tinkering, chasing, or forecasting our way in and out of markets.
- No ego. We default to passive, and pay for active management only in the few corners, such as listed property and infrastructure, where the evidence gives us genuine conviction it adds value.
Our own white paper puts it bluntly. Active management is a zero-sum game that turns negative after fees, so passive is the default starting position for every portfolio, and active is used only where there is high confidence of a reward worth the risk. A robust, top-down asset allocation with a straightforward, low-cost design, we wrote, ‘offers investors the best chance of investment success.’
Notice the language: best chance. We do not promise to win every year. We play the balance of probabilities.
What it looks like in practice: Lifestyle Model 6
Take our highest-growth model, Lifestyle Model 6. It holds around 97% growth assets, built almost entirely from low-cost index funds spanning Australian, global and emerging-market shares, with active managers used only in listed property and infrastructure. It doesn’t try to beat the index; it is the index, held cheaply and diversified across the world’s markets.
And by doing the unglamorous thing consistently, it has comfortably done its actual job: meeting the client outcome.
| Return to 30 June 2026 | Lifestyle Model 6 (net of fees) | Objective: RBA Cash + 4% p.a. |
| 1 year | 14.4% | 8.1% |
| 3 years p.a. | 14.8% | 8.5% |
| 5 years p.a. | 9.7% | 7.4% |
| Since inception (Jan 2019) p.a. | 12.1% | 6.5% |
The model’s goal is to beat the RBA cash rate by 4% a year over rolling seven-year periods. Since inception in January 2019 it has returned 12.1% p.a. against that 6.5% p.a. objective, close to double the target. That is a client outcome, not a benchmark bragging right.
No forecasting. No star manager. No ego. Just the mandate, held.
The balance of probabilities
Investing is not a game of certainties. No one, not us and not the best fund manager alive, knows what markets will do next year. What we can do is stack every knowable probability in the client’s favour:
- Lower costs, because every dollar not lost to fees is a dollar that keeps compounding.
- Broad diversification, because it protects against the future we cannot see.
- Discipline, because the winners rotate, and staying invested beats leaping between them.
- Evidence, because we would rather be reliably right than occasionally brilliant.
Each of those, on its own, nudges the odds. Together, they move them decisively. That is the whole game: not predicting the future, but preparing for it so thoroughly that we don’t need to.
The evidence has told the same story for more than twenty years, and every new scorecard tells it again. We are very comfortable being on this side of it. Set the mandate. Get out of the way. No ego, and let the balance of probabilities, and time, do the heavy lifting.
Sources: S&P Dow Jones Indices, SPIVA Australia Scorecard (Year-End 2024) and Australia Persistence Scorecard (Year-End 2024); IWP ‘Constructing Diversified Model Portfolios’ White Paper (November 2023); Lifestyle Model 6 Quarterly Report (Hub24), June 2026.
This article is general information only and does not take into account your objectives, financial situation or needs. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future performance. Consider whether this information is appropriate for you and seek personal advice before acting.